A few problems with BSD

[Doug Alan]

The following are a few problems I've had with 4.3BSD on a uVax II in
dealing with disk subsystems that I've put together myself.  I'm
wondering whether I'm doing something wrong, or whether these are
known bugs, and whether or not there is a work-around:

   (1) If you accidentally attempt to boot a system on a disk drive
       for which there is no partition table in the kernal, BSD kindly
       trashes the filesystem for you.  This is of more than academic
       concern, because it has happened to me.  This happened when I
       built a new kernal, but the distributed version of uda.c got
       accidentally used, rather than our modified version.  Is there
       any work-around for this problem?  (Other than being perfect
       and never accidentally booting the wrong kernal.)

   (2) It appears that the BSD bootblocks will not boot a kernal that
       is bigger than a certain size.  This happened to me, and it was
       very frustrating to figure out what the problem was.  I finally
       replaced the BSD bootblocks with the Ultrix bootstrap system,
       and this fixed things.

   (3) In the partition table for a disk drive, a "-1" for the size of
       a partition is supposed to mean that the partition contains
       everything up to the end of the disk.  It seems, however, that
       this only works if the disk is less than a certain size.  Is
       this indeed the case, or am I doing something wrong?  If I
       could get this to work for any sized disk drive, then I could
       make just one partition table for all drives and use the disk
       partitioning features of our disk controller to make logical
       disk drives in place of the normal BSD Unix disk partition
       notion.

I also have a more academic question: A BSD filesystem is supposed to
begin on a cylinder boundary for performance reasons.  Is swap space
also supposed to begin a cylinder boundary, or does it make no
difference?  I know there's "tunefs", and there's tuna fish, but
there's no "tuneswap"....

|>oug /\lan
   (or nessus at athena.mit.edu
       nessus at mit-eddie.uucp)


P.S.  The hardware I've been dealing with is a VAXstation II with a Sigma
SDC-RQD11-EC disk controller and Maxtor XT4380E, XT8380E, and XT8760E
disk drives.