Subject: Re: Suggestions for easing 1.1 i386 installations
To: Simon J. Gerraty <sjg@zen.void.oz.au>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>
List: current-users
Date: 10/08/1995 13:17:39
> It would be a big win if the user could say how many Mb they want
> for each partition and the install script round that out to the next
> cylinder boundary. Not sure about anyone else, but I find computers
> are better at math than I am :-)
A few comments:
* This empirically isn't hard to do (not that you'd suspect it
would be). We have a NetBSD/i386 installation procedure at
MIT (highly tailored to our environment), and it uses
megabyte measurements. We don't even bother to round up to
the next cylinder boundary (is there really an advantage any
more?), but that would be an easy addition.
* To avoid trashing people's disks, use fdisk to obtain the
starting and ending sector of the NetBSD partition. fdisk
will (due to my recent changes) also figure out the
translated geometry of the disk for you as long as you have
at least one partition and your all your partitions use
consistent mappings.
MIT's installation procedure will even help you use fdisk to
create a NetBSD partition as long as there's space in the
partition table. I don't recommend this for the actual
installation, because fdisk will still fail to find the
translated geometry when the partition table is empty. (In
this case, the MIT installation leaves one sector *less*
than a track empty at the beginning of the disk so that it
will still work if fdisk uses the wrong geometry, but this
isn't very kosher.) This will no longer be an issue when
the kernel has a way of communicating disks' BIOS geometry
to user space.
I'm spending most of my NetBSD time this fall on getting emulation
readdir calls to work with remote filesystems using cookies, but I
hope to be able to work on the installation procedure during the
pre-freeze part of the 1.2 release cycle. (Hopefully I can factor out
some port-independent code while I'm at it.)