Re: Status of Debian on Sun Blade 150
Some issues:
1) Cylinder 0 is the fastest for data access since it's on the outside
of the disk where more data rotates under the head on each revolution.
2) I have set up partitions starting from Cylinder 1 before in
violation of the rule and it still worked. Therefore, I would like to
know why this worked if the rule does not agree.
--- Frans Pop <aragorn@tiscali.nl> wrote:
> On Thursday 28 April 2005 02:35, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> > On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Wiktor Wandachowicz wrote:
> > > Frans Pop wrote:
> > >> With sun-disklabel you are not allowed to put swap or RAID or
> LVM at
> > >> the start of the disk. ext2/ext3 are OK.
> >
> > Frans, if you are referring to #283303, I thought that we've fixed
> it.
> > At least the bug is marked 'fixed' when version 62 of partman has
> been
> > uploaded, and I remember testing it and confirming that the bug is
> > gone. Version in RC3 is 63, so it should be fixed there too.
>
> I've read through that bug and I think it is related, but does not
> cover
> the whole issue.
> The basic problem AFAICT is that a linux swap partition does not
> treat the
> first sectors of a partition as special. I think that is reasonable
> as
> booting from a swap partition is, in general, nonsense. Ext2/3 _does_
>
> reserve the first sectors of the partition for bootloader etc, so
> putting
> that at the start of the disk is OK.
> See also the 2nd para under "DESCRIPTION" of silo(8) manpage.
>
> Please read [1]:
> - the 1st partition is required to start on sector 0;
> - bootloader and disklabel info is written to the first sectors of
> the disk;
> - _all sectors_ of a linux swap partition are used for swap and so
> may be overwritten when the partition is formatted or used.
> Conclusion: don't put swap (or RAID or LVM) at the beginning of a Sun
>
> disklabel disk!
>
> The logical thing to do is to put either the / partition or a small
> /boot
> partition at the start of a disk for Sparc systems.
>
> This is also confirmed by the last postings to #283303. I think the
> patch
> in that bug only resolves some _symptoms_ of this issue, but does not
>
> address the real problem.
>
> The MSDOS disklabel apparently automatically reserves the first
> sectors of
> a disk for the MBR, therefore having swap on the 1st partition of a
> MSDOS
> disc is not a problem.
>
> [1]
> http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.sparc/apbs05.html#id2538449
>
> Cheers,
> FJP
>
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