bsdlabel and sparc

[Joerg Wunsch]

As mailinglists at debank.tv wrote:

> I'm a bit in the dark how to use the bsdlabel facility on FBSD-5.3-STABLE.
> I'm supposed to give an architecture flag but it doesn't support sparc64.
> What's going wrong (or better yet: what am I doing wrong ?)

You are not supposed to use BSD-style labels natively on sparc64, as
the native label format of that architecture is sunlabel (which is
natively understood by the Openboot PROM).

bsdlabel support is merely to allow access to the label (and thus
partitions) of a BSD-style labelled disk from outside.  So you ought
to provide the architecture name of the machine your disk is from.

The command disklabel is an alias for sunlabel on sparc64, while it is
an alias for bsdlabel on all other architectures.

As both labels are located in different blocks of the disk, you could
even have both labels...  Looks really funny, you get dev nodes like
/dev/da0ab and such then. ;-)

-- 
J"org Wunsch                                           Unix support engineer
joerg_wunsch at interface-systems.de        http://www.interface-systems.de/~j/