Re: fdisk(8) vs gpart(8), and gnop

On Sat, 2014-05-31 at 19:00 -0700, John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> Michael W. Lucas wrote this message on Sat, May 31, 2014 at 20:42 -0400:
> > $SUBJECT have been two contentious points of discussion in private
> > mail, Twitter, the BSDCan bar track, and random people passing on the
> > street. I was very surprised at the number of knowledgeable people who
> > have different ideas on this and argue about it at length.
> > 
> > I'm hoping to verify what seems to be correct.
> > 
> > First, is fdisk EVER necessary? I *believe* that gpart's '-a 4k'
> > handles all alignment issues for the 512B/4KB sector issues. If you
> 
> gpart's -a will not properly align MBR's slices due to enforced CHS...

Maybe this is naive, but... can't we just *fix* that?  

For the longest time geom would warn about "geometry does not match
label" that had something to do with different parts of the code
calculating different CHS values.  Eventually it was decided to remove
the unactionable message, and my vague memory is that the justification
was basically "because CHS is meaningless to geom and modern BIOSen."

If there's some "it would cause problems on this ancient hardware that
only 3 people in the world use" (I'm usually one of those people -- we
support some old equipment in the field at $work), then maybe there
could be a flag that enables the old CHS alignment behavior.

-- Ian

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