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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!cancer.vividnet.com!hunter.premier.net!news-res.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Fun with slices and partitions Date: 28 Jul 1996 08:10:56 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 50 Message-ID: <4tf7ag$72s@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <uybk7b3br.fsf@losira.ppe.bb-data.de> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E mib@bb-data.de (Martin Ibert) wrote: > : Yep, wrong way around. Four _slices_ per disk (what DOS fdisk calls > : partitions), and a bunch of BSD _partitions_ in each slice (8, IIRC). > > *sigh* Yes, strangely enough, FreeBSD choose to pervert the > well-established name hierarchy of top-level partitions and > second-level slices and do it the other way around. It was only well-established in SysV, and you can as well blame _them_ for reversing the logic. Every Unix so far came with partitioning of its own, since it traditionally `owned' the entire disk. The only exceptions of this are Minix and Coherent, both are not `Unix' but PC-grown systems. Since Linux inherited much from Minix in its first days, in particular in the file system area, it is no surprise that they took this route. I'm sure they have been faced similar problems however when porting the system to other architectures that don't have an fdisk table. This Unix-internal partitioning is also the origin of BSD partitions. They have been called by this term all the time (remember, 386BSD 0.0 still didn't knew anything about fdisk tables!), and so the choice was to not break with this naming. > Basically, I like FreeBSD better, but the way it handles hard disks > sucks hard, IMHO. The only "neat" thing about it is the way to > "dangerously dedicate" a disk if you don't want any other operating > systems. For coexistence, a Linux-like scheme of using the existing > partitioning scheme would IMHO have been more elegant. I wonder what you're bitching here... You've got _both_, so if you prefer the fdisk way better, why don't you simply use it??? (I prefer the `dangerously dedicated' way, but you probably knew this.) The only limitation is that the root file system must reside in the so-called ``compatibility slice'' since this is the only area the bootstrap has access to. (It's the first slice with a 0xa5 signature, by slot # in the fdisk table.) Btw., speaking of `elegant' for an fdisk scheme with its horrible chaining is perhaps an overstatement. Though i agree that the 8-slot partition tables aren't _that_ much better either. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)