new installer disklabel question

[Didier Wiroth-2]

Hello,

As an OpenBSD hobby user, I really appreciate your new installer and your
automatic disklabel feature it is of GREAT help. I'm not very comfortable
with fdisk and disklabel so this is a really welcomed feature and aid.

Though, I'm missing 1 disklabel, the /altroot label, as it helped me several
times in the past. Is there any reason why you omit this label creation?

Do you think it could be added in the future to the automatic label creation
or may be adding it after f.ex. answering a question (do you want an /altroot
blah blah ...?) ?

I know it should not be considered as a standard backup solution, but it still
is a nice help.

Kind regards,
Didier

[Otto Moerbeek]

On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 09:33:17AM +0200, Didier Wiroth wrote:

> Hello,
>
> As an OpenBSD hobby user, I really appreciate your new installer and your
> automatic disklabel feature it is of GREAT help. I'm not very comfortable
> with fdisk and disklabel so this is a really welcomed feature and aid.
>
> Though, I'm missing 1 disklabel, the /altroot label, as it helped me several
> times in the past. Is there any reason why you omit this label creation?
>
> Do you think it could be added in the future to the automatic label creation
> or may be adding it after f.ex. answering a question (do you want an /altroot
> blah blah ...?) ?
>
> I know it should not be considered as a standard backup solution, but it still
> is a nice help.
>
> Kind regards,
> Didier

The goal of the automatic disklabel is to get a reasonable layout for
one-disk setups. Anything beyond that is out of scope for the moment.

I'm working on code to tweak the sizes of the auto label, but that's
for the next release anyway, and still targets one-disk setups.

        -Otto

[Theo de Raadt]

> As an OpenBSD hobby user, I really appreciate your new installer and your
> automatic disklabel feature it is of GREAT help. I'm not very comfortable
> with fdisk and disklabel so this is a really welcomed feature and aid.
>
> Though, I'm missing 1 disklabel, the /altroot label, as it helped me several
> times in the past. Is there any reason why you omit this label creation?
>
> Do you think it could be added in the future to the automatic label creation
> or may be adding it after f.ex. answering a question (do you want an /altroot
> blah blah ...?) ?
>
> I know it should not be considered as a standard backup solution, but it still
> is a nice help.

We have 16 partitions.  Amongst that are b and c.  So we have 14 partitions.
We can potentially discover i - p using MBR reading or whatnot on other
architectures, so we have potentially even less.

We never did altroot automatically, and we don't do it now.

[STeve Andre']

On Thursday 09 July 2009 12:44:40 Theo de Raadt wrote:

> > As an OpenBSD hobby user, I really appreciate your new installer and your
> > automatic disklabel feature it is of GREAT help. I'm not very comfortable
> > with fdisk and disklabel so this is a really welcomed feature and aid.
> >
> > Though, I'm missing 1 disklabel, the /altroot label, as it helped me
> > several times in the past. Is there any reason why you omit this label
> > creation?
> >
> > Do you think it could be added in the future to the automatic label
> > creation or may be adding it after f.ex. answering a question (do you
> > want an /altroot blah blah ...?) ?
> >
> > I know it should not be considered as a standard backup solution, but it
> > still is a nice help.
>
> We have 16 partitions.  Amongst that are b and c.  So we have 14
> partitions. We can potentially discover i - p using MBR reading or whatnot
> on other architectures, so we have potentially even less.
>
> We never did altroot automatically, and we don't do it now.

What reasons are there for not extending partitions to z?  With 2T disks
out, having 14 partitions means not being able to make smaller ones.

--STeve Andre'

[Ted Unangst-2]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 12:55 PM, STeve Andre'<andres@...> wrote:
> What reasons are there for not extending partitions to z?  With 2T disks
> out, having 14 partitions means not being able to make smaller ones.

the disklabel must fit in only so much disk.  if you want lots of baby
partitions, you can use softraid to chop up the big disk into smaller
disks.

[Theo de Raadt]

> What reasons are there for not extending partitions to z?  With 2T disks
> out, having 14 partitions means not being able to make smaller ones.

I could make it 32 partitions, but utterly break backwards compatibility
with previous releases...  or accept that the current situation covers
99.99% of usage cases.

[Edd Barrett]

Hi Theo and tech@,

On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 12:42:05PM -0600, Theo de Raadt wrote:
> > What reasons are there for not extending partitions to z?  With 2T disks
> > out, having 14 partitions means not being able to make smaller ones.
>
> I could make it 32 partitions, but utterly break backwards compatibility
> with previous releases...  or accept that the current situation covers
> 99.99% of usage cases.

Good work on the new installer improvements. I especially like the
initial user creation, as its the first thing I used to do on a new
system.

I just wacked in a large (by my standards) FCAL disk into my Sun; it is
136GB in size.

The installer's auto-layout wanted to make relatively small root and
/usr partitions (I'm assuming the minimums). Could be nice if the slice
sizes "scaled up" across larger disks? Perhaps based upon a percentage
of the total disk available?

Just a minor thought really.

--

Best Regards

Edd Barrett
(Freelance software developer / technical writer / open-source developer)

http://students.dec.bmth.ac.uk/ebarrett

[Stuart Henderson-6]

On 2009/07/16 16:43, Edd Barrett wrote:

> Hi Theo and tech@,
>
> On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 12:42:05PM -0600, Theo de Raadt wrote:
> > > What reasons are there for not extending partitions to z?  With 2T disks
> > > out, having 14 partitions means not being able to make smaller ones.
> >
> > I could make it 32 partitions, but utterly break backwards compatibility
> > with previous releases...  or accept that the current situation covers
> > 99.99% of usage cases.
>
> Good work on the new installer improvements. I especially like the
> initial user creation, as its the first thing I used to do on a new
> system.
>
> I just wacked in a large (by my standards) FCAL disk into my Sun; it is
> 136GB in size.
>
> The installer's auto-layout wanted to make relatively small root and
> /usr partitions (I'm assuming the minimums). Could be nice if the slice
> sizes "scaled up" across larger disks? Perhaps based upon a percentage
> of the total disk available?
>
> Just a minor thought really.

they do, up to a limit. see the space_allocation struct's in
disklabel/editor.c