disklabel differences FreeBSD, DragonFly

[Rick C. Petty]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 09:49:48AM -0400, Steve Ames wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 02:21:59PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> > 
> > DragonFly disklabels allow 16 entries by default, FreeBSD still limits
> > it to 8. That's why you can't read it directly.
> 
> Are there plans to bump the default up from 8? I'm honestly torn on
> this topic whenever I install a new system. On the one hand I like
> having a lot of discrete mountpoints to control potential usage. On
> the other hand with drive space being so inexpensive I sometimes
> wonder if I need to bother and can get away with very few mountpoints.

I would think that cheap disk space would mean larger disks which implies
more mountpoints ???

> On very large disks (or arrays that appear as a single disk) I have
> to create multiple slices in order to get more than 8 mountpoints. Its
> an extra hoop to jump through.

Use gpt on non boot-disks, or use gvinum if you have lots of storage and
like the inherent advantage of named labels, striping, and redundancy.

I wasn't very happy with gpt or bsdlabel recently because you aren't
allowed to modify the partitions if the gpt/bsdlabel is in use (i.e. one
of the other partitions is currently mounted as a filesystem).  I hope the
GEOM people are working to improve this.

-- Rick C. Petty