Re: Call for disk donations (was Re: difference between newfs and newfs -m 1 on a 250G hd?)

2005-07-04 Thread Otto Moerbeek 
On Mon, 27 Jun 2005, Otto Moerbeek wrote:

 My work to fix the userland disk utilities (fdisk, disklabel, newfs)
 to work properly on large file systems always has been handicapped
 because I do not have very large disks. I think I managed to make all
 legal block and fragment size combinations work in 3.7, but I always
 have to resort to svnd tricks to test my stuff. Now as you all know
 testing using a simulation always has the chanche of hiding real
 bugs or introducing problems that would not have occurred using the
 real thing, and so introducing noise in the test results. 
 
 So if some kind persons are willing to donate some large disks (say 
 150G), I'd be very happy. Ideally I want to be able to create 1TB file
 systems, the limit of UFS1. I do not need a single disk that large,
 since I can use ccd(4). I can use both IDE and SCSI disks. I do not
 have a mortherboard that has SATA. 

Indeed, some kind persons donated enough so I have now 4 300MB SATA
disks coming my way, plus a LSI MegaRAID SATA controller. I already
have a machine with 4 empty bays and power to spare, so I expect to
have a setup that's capable of creating large file systems running
soon. 

In the mean time, I'm creating some test programs to fill file systems
with files containing simple patterns, so I later check the contents
both by reading and checking the complete file or just by sampling of
some bytes at different offsets.

Thanks to all who donated!

-Otto

Call for disk donations (was Re: difference between newfs and newfs -m 1 on a 250G hd?)

2005-06-27 Thread Otto Moerbeek 
On Mon, 27 Jun 2005, Otto Moerbeek wrote:

 Try to reproduce the problem after having run fdisk (if it is
 applicable, still don't know your platform, arghhh), disklabel and
 newfs. If you can still reproduce the problem, I'll put this on my
 TODO list, but not very high. 

OK, you got me curious. I tried to reproduce your problem on a
-current system using a sparse svnd image of 250G, I don't have a 250G disk.

I could not reproduce your problem. This might be well be because I made
some fixes to newfs that went into 3.7. 

This clearly shows that patform and version info is needed in bug reports.

But actually this post is a call for donations.

My work to fix the userland disk utilities (fdisk, disklabel, newfs)
to work properly on large file systems always has been handicapped
because I do not have very large disks. I think I managed to make all
legal block and fragment size combinations work in 3.7, but I always
have to resort to svnd tricks to test my stuff. Now as you all know
testing using a simulation always has the chanche of hiding real
bugs or introducing problems that would not have occurred using the
real thing, and so introducing noise in the test results. 

So if some kind persons are willing to donate some large disks (say 
150G), I'd be very happy. Ideally I want to be able to create 1TB file
systems, the limit of UFS1. I do not need a single disk that large,
since I can use ccd(4). I can use both IDE and SCSI disks. I do not
have a mortherboard that has SATA. 

Please contact me privately if you have someting to offer. I live in
the Netherlands.

Note: to avoid any misunderstanding: this is NOT a promise to work on
UFS2 support. Since I'm almost 100% a userland hacker, this is out of
my league.

-Otto