Daniel Ouellet wrote: > Hi, > > First off. I wanted to take a little time to thank you for making the > install even simpler and faster. Who would have thought that a simple > install could be made simpler. You guys did it again! > > On a side note, I have a question on the auto partition as I see this > changing in very nice way and quickly these days. Again, many thanks guys! > > In case the box have the old 137GB limits. Does the new process actually > can see that may be? I don't know if that informations is even available > somehow in the kernel, or else where, but can this detect the limitation > of the BIOS? Really no big deal at all, just curious more then anything > and I don't have a box to test right now and really curious to know. (;>
The question is WHICH 137GB limit (or 128GB limit as I'd like to call it, but even I'm finding myself rounding up to marketing numbers, but I digress. again). You mention sparc64, which has some "special" limits due to the brain dead IDE controller on a few sparc systems. On most other IDE controllers, the 128GB limit is just a boot issue, you can stick a 500GB drive on a pre-LBA48 controller, and it just works, but don't try to boot beyond 128GB...or 32GB, or 8GB or whatever your BIOS is limited to. Once you boot, the entire drive is yours to use as you wish. So...sparc64 users will probably need to try to find sub-128G drives for their machines (or just put a CF-IDE adapter in, boot from flash and use a non-stupid IDE interface for non-boot partitions). Users with systems that have BIOS limitations will have to respect that, though it shouldn't be the installer's problem, as it seems the installer "Auto"s to small enough root partitions that only a few old 486 systems with disks they probably couldn't fsck anyway will have to manually override. (and I'm not entirely sure I remember what the big disk issue is with sparc64 systems...guess I need to find out, and put it in the FAQ so I can look it up next time I forget. :) > I will test with the latest snapshot when available on SPARC64, but I > really wonder as the box I could use are remote and obviously, well I > wouldn't want to crash it. Not a big deal in the end anyway, just wonder > what the answer might be. > > I will find one that I can do locally in a few days, but wonder if the > above was even possible. > > I don't recall haven't seen any records in the sysctl output that show > the BIOS limits, but I sure could be wrong. You couldn't trust it if it did. Bugs in BIOSs are very, very common. They have one benchmark: can they boot DOS and Windows...if so, "did our job", the rest is the problem for those pesky, non-mainstream OSs to take care of. Back when tom@ did the new boot loader, which removed the 8G boot limit of the old loader, and did a bunch of other more subtle (but wonderful) things, we had difficulty finding machines that could boot beyond 128G. Sure, the BIOSs claimed compatibility, but all they did is accurately report the size of the drive, most couldn't actually boot from beyond 128GB. I'm happy to report things are much better now...it seems newer BIOSs did eventually start to work as users would assume. In short: practically, you couldn't trust what the BIOS told you, you will either have to design conservatively, or test YOUR box carefully (and hope your spare parts machine is no worse than your production system!). Non-multiboot users won't have to worry about it (except on sparc64..and the sparc64 users issues haven't changed). And remember: The Auto layout is just a suggested starting point, nothing mandates using the suggested layout if YOUR situation overrides the default assumptions. Personally, I can't imagine there are many applications of 250G disks where the entire disk needs to or should be allocated. If you are building a firewall, 8G is still a plenty big chunk of disk to allocate, and a /lot/ faster to fsck after you trip over the power cord. ... > PS: Who could even possibly think of asking for a GUI installer after > that. I love it! wait for it. :-/ Nick.
