On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 01:29:42PM +0100, Vim Visual wrote:
> ...The installation guide gives a nice example of a system with a windows
> partition on it.

There is also a guide for Linux users -- look for the INSTALL.linux file
in the .../4.0/i386 directory at your local mirror.

> I intend to enable in the future the suspend-to-disk option ...

To date, OpenBSD uses APM for power management.  ACPI is in development,
and is not yet enabled in the GENERIC kernel.  Some laptops have APM only,
some have ACPI only, and some have both.  Depending on your particular
laptop, you may not be able to take advantage of *any* suspend capabilities
at the moment.  

I'm not aware of any suspend-to-disk feature as part of APM. Implementations
of various suspend-to-disk options that I've seen have been OS-specific, 
such as Microsoft's "Hibernate" -- or have been hardware vendor and OS-
specific, such as the various suspend-to-disk options that were 
available from laptop vendors in the Windows 95 era.

The OpenBSD Project keeps a user-supported database of i386 laptops and
their various behaviors.  If you haven't seen it yet, you might find your
make and model listed:

http://openbsd.rt.fm/i386-laptop.html

> ...My problem is that I don't understand what this paragraph means:
> 
> "On platforms which use fdisk...

It can be confusing.  Don't worry.  It will all come together for you
soon.  Fortunately it takes time rather than brains.  :)

At least one reply has already been posted that discusses OpenBSD's 
partitioning.  Just remember that on i386 (and a few other architectures),
your laptop's BIOS will look for an MBR (master boot record) in order to
boot from the hard drive. 

Space needs to be reserved at the beginning of the hard drive's addressing
to make room for the MBR area.  

There are two ways to give an address to a 512-byte sector on an IDE hard
drive:  By cylinder/head/sector numbers, or by logical block address.  If 
you look at the output of OpenBSD's fdisk, you get both.  The first sector 
on the drive will be cylinder 0, head 0, sector 1.  Or LBA 0.  Same 512-byte 
area, two different ways to describe it.

Modern-day IDE/ATA drives all use 63 sectors-per-track, regardless of actual
hardware geometry.  If you reserve the first track (starting at sector #0) for
the MBR, you can begin your first MBR partition at the 64th sector, which is 
addressed as either cylinder 0, head 1, track 1 ... or LBA 63.

Here's an example from my laptop, which has a Microsft NTFS partition and 
an OpenBSD partition:
------------
Disk: wd0       geometry: 2432/255/63 [39070080 Sectors]
Offset: 0       Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending       LBA Info:
 #: id    C   H  S -    C   H  S [       start:      size   ]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 0: 07    0   1  1 -  522 254 63 [          63:     8401932 ] HPFS/QNX/AUX
*1: A6  523   0  1 - 1815 254 63 [     8401995:    20772045 ] OpenBSD     
 2: 00    0   0  0 -    0   0  0 [           0:           0 ] unused      
 3: 00    0   0  0 -    0   0  0 [           0:           0 ] unused      
------------
As you can see, the NTFS MBR partition begins at CHS 0/1/1, which is LBA #63.
Confusing, but that's the way of things.  Not only are there two different
ways to address a sector (and the fdisk report shows both), but one value
starts counting from the number 1 (sector # in CHS addressing), while
every other value starts counting from the number 0. Plus, we talk of
"tracks" which are shown here as "heads."  

If you don't like it, join the club.  No one likes this, not even storage
product manufacturers and distributors.  The growth of drives and electronics
to manage them was not a smooth, homogenous, and harmonious development.  Be
grateful that IDE/ATA manufacturers now hide their physical geometries from
your BIOS, and that these drives all use fixed block architectures.  It 
used to be .... much, much worse. :)
_______________________________________________
Openbsd-newbies mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mailman.theapt.org/listinfo/openbsd-newbies

Reply via email to