Dangerously Dedicated

[Polytropon]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:33:17 +0100, Rolf Nielsen <listreader at lazlarlyricon.com> wrote:
> As far as I understand it, it's called Dangerously Dedicated because it 
> may cause other systems not to recognise the disk.

Primarily, it's called "dedicated" (only) because it describes
a setting where a whole hard disk is dedicated to the FreeBSD
operating system. The addition "dangerously" seems to describe
the danger that other operating systems cannot handle such a
disk layout, or may cause problems to them - but I don't know
this for sure because I'm not a "multi-booter". :-)



> Consequently, 
> newfs'ing a slice without first partitioning it can hardly be DD, since 
> that is what other systems do, right?

If you run newfs inside a slice, you would create a partition
covering the whole slice, and so it's still compatibility mode
(the opposite of DD mode); DD mode implies the absence of a 
slice at all.

	da0  da0s1  da0s1c
	{    [      (/)      ]   }

Other systems operate on slice level, on a "DOS primary partition",
where they create their file systems in a certain way, e. g.
an msdos file system. In such a case, there are no partitions
inside the slice because partitions are specific to operating
systems like FreeBSD.

	da0  da0s1    da0s2    da0s3  da0s3a
	{    [ C: ]   [ D: ]   [      (/)      ]   }
	     msdosfs  msdosfs         ufs



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...