Documentation and similar issues with 5.3

[William H. Magill]

On 07 Jan, 2005, at 11:03, Wilko Bulte wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 08:47:00PM -0500, William H. Magill wrote..
>> On 06 Jan, 2005, at 13:26, Wilko Bulte wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> You could use Auto from sysinstall for a start.
>>
>> As I recall, I couldn't get "Auto" to work. I had to define layouts
>> manually.
>
> That is strange, given that it worked for me the last times I built the
> release ISOs.  We have had problems in the past with disks that
> contained previous Tru64 or OVMS data / disklabels.  Zeroing the disks
> before use with 'dd' or somesuch fixed that.  I do believe this issue
> was fixed but I am not sure.

In this particular case, the disk had previously had OpenBSD installed.

However, I had been unable to install OpenBSD until I used the "Jump 
Start"
CD  from Q to "clear" the old labels.  (The disk prior to that had had 
NetBSD
Installed on it!)

Is there an installation "log file" where values and etc input are 
recorded?

> OK, yes, we mean different things.  Formatting for me is sending your 
> SCSI
> disks a FORMAT UNIT SCSI command.  Creating filesystems / newfs-ing
> are obviously needed to do something sensible with the disks

Ok, that's what I guessed. After thinking a bit I realized that I had 
lapsed
into "unspecific terminology." Thinking back, I can't remember when the 
last time
was that I wound up issuing a FORMAT Unit command for any reason!

>>> fdisk is a PeeCee concept, it is not used on Alpha.
>>
>> It would be good if there was something, somewhere which said that ...
>> like maybe in section 2.2 of the hardware notes.
>
> Well, yeah... There is probably more like this stuff missing.  Lemme 
> see
> if I can add that info.  Note that there is a generic and a Alpha 
> specific
> part in the notes, these are generated from different source files.
> proc-alpha.sgml is my baby, and like the name indicates contains the 
> alpha
> specific stuff.

I'll go through my notes and "pay attention" when I re-install, to see 
if there
is anything else that might be of particular difference with the Alpha 
install.

The one thing which I have noticed, however, is that that there is 
nothing I
have been able to find which recommends partition sizes, especially for 
various
disk geometries. As I recall, there were quite a number of "unused 
sector"
(or something like that) messages during the initialization.

The partition sizes I picked wound up with only 39% used for / but 70%
used for /usr, and 2% for /var. With a 9 gig drive:

  xp1> sudo disklabel  da0
# /dev/da0:
8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
   a:   262144        0    4.2BSD     2048 16384 16392
   b:  2097152   262144      swap
   c: 17773524        0    unused        0     0         # "raw" part, 
don't edit
   d:   409600  2359296    4.2BSD     2048 16384 25608
   e:  4194304  2768896    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28528
   f: 10810324  6963200    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28528
Where:
a= /
b= swap
d= /var
e= /usr
f= /local0

I think I used A- 100 meg B- 2 gig D- 400 meg E-4 gig F- rest.
(I did use the "meg" and "gig" terms in the initilaization)


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