disk numbering

[Christian Koch <cfkoch%sdf.lonestar.org@localhost>]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 06:23:15AM +0000, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> > I had never thought of using wedge names to keep things consistent in this
> > sort of situation, that's really clever.
>         
> > Wedges can be difficult to understand precisely because they are so
> > abstract, I agree... they're like an abstraction of making partitions in
> > general. Pretty academic stuff, but super useful (it's why I keep coming
> > back to NetBSD).
>         
> > Just throwing it out there: an alternative approach is to use DragonFly,
> > which allows you to access disks by their serial number, which theoretically
> > never change. The disadvantage is DragonFly is not portable at all (i386 or
> > x86_64 only).
>         
> > -Christian
> 
> DragonFly can see my hard-disk partitions but can't mount any, for whatever
> reason.
> 
> Also, DragonFly gives me no Internet access on my hardware.
> 
> DragonFly file systems seem to be unmountable/unreadable from FreeBSD and
> NetBSD.
> 
> Accessing GPT partitions is easier in Linux and even better in FreeBSD.
> Partitions can be labeled, nothing sneaky about partition/wedge numbering, and
> device nodes are created dynamically instead of having to be preallocated.

Well, if the DragonFly file systems you are referring to are formatted with
HAMMER, then of course NetBSD and FreeBSD won't be able to mount them. Only
DragonFly has complete read/write capabilities for HAMMER, and Linux can mount a
HAMMER system read-only last time I checked, and beyond that, no other systems
have any support at all.

On the other hand, if you're referring to UFS and/or FFS file systems created
from a DragonFly install, then that's highly unusual... you should be able to
mount them, they're just the boring, old-fashioned file systems we're all used
to, right?  Maybe it's worth mentioning to the DragonFly developers, or at least
some more experimentation on my part.

I do agree that FreeBSD's GPT handling is much more sophisticated than most of
the alternatives. 

-Christian