8.0-RELEASE and "dangerously dedicated" disks

[Maxim Khitrov]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Peggy Wilkins <enlil65 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can someone elaborate on what exactly this statement in the 8.0
> detailed release notes means?
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.0R/relnotes-detailed.html#FS
>
>> 2.2.5 File Systems
>>
>> “dangerously dedicated” mode for the UFS file system is no longer supported.
>>
>>  Important: Such disks will need to be reformatted to work with this release.
>
> Due to history I won't go into, all my production (currently
> 7.2-RELEASE) systems are installed onto "dangerously dedicated" disks.
>  What exactly do I need to do to upgrade them to 8.0?  (I'm not asking
> for an upgrade procedure, I'm familiar with that, but rather, how this
> change impacts the upgrade.)  I think that the suggestion that the
> disks need to be reformatted is extreme and I hope something less
> extreme will suffice.
>
> Also, just to be clear, does this statement refer to boot disks, data
> disks, or both?
>
> It doesn't make sense to me that "dangerously dedicated" could have an
> impact on UFS filesystems specifically.  A partition table is just a
> partition table, regardless of what filesystems might be written on
> disks, yes?  Am I misunderstanding something here?
>
> Thanks for helping to clear up my confusion...
>
> plw

Peggy,

Were you able to find an answer for this? I also have a number of
servers and firewalls that use dangerously dedicated disks (boot and
data). I don't see why UFS would care if it's mounted from ad1a vs.
ad1s1a.

- Max