Re: mke2fs

[David Stern <kotsya@u.washington.edu>]

On Thu, 2 Oct 1997, David Wright wrote:

> On Wed, 1 Oct 1997, David Stern wrote:
>
> [..Deleted stuff for brevity..]
> 
> > Are you merely a stickler for detail, or does it concern you that
> > devices exist which have little (if any) practical use and are
> > potentially problematic? 
> 
> Yes, I'm afraid I'm a stickler for detail. It looks like the (old, if 
> that's what you used; it's certainly what I used) installation disks are 
> broken if they have /dev/sda16 on them. If /you/ had created /device/, then 
> the problem might have only been present on your system. That's what I 
> understood Philippe to be implying with "BTW, you have created sda16 
> yourself didn't you :-)".

I thought of both devices and partitions, neither seemed to fit at the
moment (late at night) and it seemed superfluous, so I chose the simpler
(partitions), just as a default.  <shrug>

I used a 2-3 week old LSL official debian 1.3.1 cdrom.

So, I suppose that creating 16 scsi devices was merely an oversight, and
likewise that creating 20 ide devices was roughly the same, thus devices
16-20 serve no practical purpose (unless obfuscation counts), correct?

> > A distantly related question (and equally important, hehe) is why those
> > plus signs show up in fdisk -l if the partition ends on an even numbered
> > cylinder.
> > 
> > /dev/sdb11         151      151      218   546178+  83  Linux native
> >                                                  ^ right there! :-)
> 
> I can't see a reference to + in man fdisk, but there's a reference there to
> fuller documentation which I haven't looked up.

Here's the elusive answer from /usr/doc/util-linux/README.fdisk.gz :

  The `+' after the sizes warns that these partitions contain an odd
  number of sectors: Linux normally allocates filespace in 1 kilobyte
  blocks.  (I cut out some references which were impertinent.)

Now that I know, what specifically is the danger of allocating filespace
in blocks which do not equal 1 kilobyte and how seriously should this
warning be taken?

Thanks,

David Stern


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