On 08/26/2013 10:55 AM, Erling Westenvik wrote: ...
Lets say I'm happening to have lots of smaller disks that I'd like to create partitions for on larger disks. Reading on the label on one such small disk that it has a capacity of 160GB, and knowing that this means 160 * 1000^3 bytes, makes it easy to create a partition that big on a larger disk without having to remember the 9 or 10 digit sector size or to look up the size in GB (eg. GiB) on the MBR or disklabel for the smaller disk. Maybe a stupid example, perhaps, but still. It's just about the potential mess with confusing unit values.
if you are designing your file systems based on marketing stickers on the drive, you have a bigger problem, really. (hint: what happens when your new 2TB disk is actually a very tiny bit smaller than your original 2TB disk? A friend of mine once spent a lot of time trying to figure out a RAID Rebuild problem because Seagate sold drives with the same model number...but different numbers of usable sectors...in this case, they were off one sector smaller than the first batch of drives!)
I guess all it boils down to is the question why OpenBSD shouldn't use standard unit names, that is GiB for gigabytes and GB for gibibytes?
you keep using this word "standard". I do not think it means what you think it means.
I've been following computers since the late 1970s. At that time, it was not decided if the 8080 and z80 CPUs could access 64K or 65K of RAM. Really, no one cared. We generally knew it was the same thing, and no one had the money for that much RAM in a computer anyway. Sure, a few idiots went for a computer advertising a 65k capacity because it was 1k more than the 64k computers, even more comical because they would never put more than 16k RAM in 'em (by the time people actually started maxing out the 8bit computers, we'd pretty well settled on 64k.
Standard set. When 'k' got absurdly small, we adopted "M" and "G" and now "T".
Disk makers, in spite of the fact that their drives are accessed in binary, and the file systems on those drives generally have structures with limits based in binary, decided that as the computer industry went mass market, they would switch to using non-binary data units for binary data to make their drives look bigger to the novices. May I suggest you instead spend your time trying to persuade the drive manufacturers to revert their drives to appropriate data processing units of measure? At least that would be a positive change for the world, unlike codifying committee crap "standards".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(data Wouldn't it be according to OpenBSD's goal to follow standards, avoiding ambiguities? I don't think users will have problems remembering what units they are in, at least not if the units are correct.
no, this is just plain stupid, a bunch of people spent someone else's money to come up with a unneeded and non-accepted standard that doesn't need to be there. And a few more people feel the need to make a name for themselves by pushing this nonstandard on those that actually make things happen in this business.
Repeat bull**** enough times, some people might start thinking it is fertilizer. But not here.
Nick.
