Documentation and similar issues with 5.3

[William H. Magill]

As I'm learning FreeBSD after a long career with Ultrix/DU/Tru64, I am
finding that A LOT of the documentation not only does not refer to 5.3,
but is EXTREMELY PC oriented.

1) Is there any Alpha oriented documentation?

2) Does anybody have any descriptions of "rational" disk layouts for
    4 or 9 gig drives? [Both boot and "other"]
    ... especially since I have a "blue" SW shelf of "VW" drives.

2A) The obsolete documention (#3 below) refers to some kind of 
"dedicated
     to FreeBSD" concept (again, clearly a PC concept)...

     but, bsdlabel complains if one newfs the "c" partition (i.e. whole 
disk).

#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
   a: 17773508       16    unused        0     0
   c: 17773524        0    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28528   # "raw" part, 
don't edit
disklabel: partition c is not marked as unused!
disklabel: An incorrect partition c may cause problems for standard 
system utilities


3) Does anybody have a description of the disk initialization process 
which applies to 5.3?

    The "diskformatting tutorial" hasn't been updated since 1997, and is 
simply wrong!
    The "handbook section 16.3.1 is also wrong.

    Probably the most glaring "error" I find is a constant reference to 
"fdisk" which no longer exists!

4) Other miscellaneous:
          disklabel is now bsdlabel -- They are linked, but the options 
are different, making all the various "command line" examples wrong.
Similarly, the man page has a "machine" option, but <machine> is not 
defined.

5) The drives I am playing with at the moment are:

"Blue" StorageWorks in a Blue Shelf -- DS-RZ1DA-VW 9.1G -- recognized 
by SRM as: BB00911CA0 FW: 3B05.

"disklabel -A da1" displays the drives as 3600 RPM, when I know they 
are 7200 RPM drives.

Drives were labeled with: "disklabel -w da1"


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# Beige G3 [Rev A motherboard - 300 MHz 768 Meg] OS X 10.2.8
# Flat-panel iMac (2.1) [800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg] OS X 10.3.7
# PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg] Tru64 5.1a
# XP1000  [Alpha 21264-3 (EV6) - 256 meg] FreeBSD 5.3
# XP1000  [Alpha 21264-A (EV 6.7) - 384 meg] FreeBSD 5.3
magill at mcgillsociety.org
magill at acm.org
magill at mac.com
whmagill at gmail.com