On 28/04/2011 17:02, Edho P Arief wrote:
On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Freddie Cash<[email protected]> wrote:
Granted, there may be reasons why it wasn't done like this in the
beginning, but my non-GEOM programmer's eyes can't see any.
I believe one of the reason is it would prevent conversion from
non-gmirror disk to gmirror one as explained here
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/geom-mirror.html
Actually, storing any kind of metadata in the first sector can lead to
weird and unexpected problems with some buggy disk controllers which
parse the MBR for some (wrong) reasons. I personally have a disk
controller which hangs on boot if the MBR contains anything but primary
partitions of DOS type (even changing the partition type makes it hang),
and that is not the only disk controller I've seen with this type of a bug.
The second reason is that storing anything except the MBR in the first
sector makes the drive non-bootable (even if the controller is ok) and
it is kind of nice to be able to make a cheap soft-RAID1 from two
ordinary (S)ATA drives.
_______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
