Re: geomman

On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 9:01 AM Braulio Rivas <brauliorivas@protonmail.com>
wrote:

> On Tuesday, August 19th, 2025 at 23:03, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 4:19 PM Braulio Rivas <brauliorivas@protonmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Hello everyone!
> > >
> > > I want to show geomman, a TUI that allows creating partitions and file
> systems (for the moment: UFS, EXT2, 3, 4, FAT16, 32, exFAT, and NTFS). I've
> been working on this for the last few months, and with the help of Robert
> Clausecker and Alfonso Siciliano, we have now published a port.
> > >
> > > The port is available on FreshPorts [1]
> > >
> > > I would like everyone to give it a try. It is based on sade [2] (the
> same tool in the FreeBSD installer). So I extended sade and added new
> features like copying/pasting partitions, labeling new partitions through
> glabel, and creating more file system types. If you have any questions, you
> can read the README.md [3].
> >
> >
> > Can you do the same with gpt or ufs labels? Glabel is dangerous since
> once you label a partition, you can only reference it through the label
> safely. Glabel creates a new device/partition that's a little smaller than
> the original. The old contents can be corrupted and weird things happen
> when you newfs on the original device. Swap with glabel can confuse crash
> dumps. And a few other weird edge cases (so it mostly works, but
> unpredictablely fails).
>
> Not for the moment, but it is planned to add labels using GPT labels or
> the file system's own method. I already have the UI set up to add these
> labels, so it would be only a matter of implementation.
>

gpt are the easiest to add. since they use a geom interface. All the others
have odd, weird commands that may or may not work after you create them
(ufs is easy, the rest, ugg). gpt is like 90% of my use cases, with UFS
being 9% and everything else being 1%. The MSDOS label is used in our
embedded images, but you can't set that, AFAIK, after you create the
filesystem with tools we have in FreeBSD base (bit mtools I think can). And
CD9660 labels are a at creation time only thing. So once you get off into
these weeds, it's weird, but gpt is straight forward, always works and has
little downside: it doesn't matter what's going on with the disk. ufs needs
to be unmounted, I think, to change with tuenfs.


> > I'd suggest this tool at least warn that there be dragons around glabel
> that aren't there for diskid, gpt or ufs label or any other fs based label.
>
> You are right, it is important to warn users. I'll add this to future
> releases. Thanks for your feedback!
>

Yea, nothing wrong, per se, with creating them, but there's oddities that
one needs to consider when doing so, much more than anything else because
the breakage might only be detected long after the creation... Thanks for
accepting my feedback!

Warner

> > Any question, issue, bug, feature request, or feedback is more than
> welcome! Please don't second-guess, and you may open an issue on the repo
> [4], send an email to [5] or [6], or jump into geomman's IRC (libera.chat)
> server #freebsd-geomman [7] (choose whatever you want).
> > >
> > > We'll continue adding more features (like complete ZFS handling).
> > >
> > > This work is sponsored by Google through Google Summer of Code [8].
> >
> >
> > I'll have to give it a spin.
> >
> > Warner
> >
> >
> >
> > > IBest,
> > > Braulio Rivas
> > >
> > > [1] https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/geomman
> > > [2] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?sade
> > > [3]
> https://gitlab.com/brauliorivas/geomman/-/blob/main/README.md?ref_type=heads
> > > [4] https://gitlab.com/brauliorivas/geomman
> > > [5] fuz@FreeBSD.org
> > > [6] brauliorivas@FreeBSD.org
> > > [7] ircs://irc.libera.chat/freebsd-geomman
> > > [8]
> https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/projects/AQdl28ee
>