On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 09:43:17AM -0400, Jason Thorpe wrote: > > > On May 27, 2026, at 8:15???AM, Anders Magnusson <[email protected]> wrote: > > > bad144 is not used by NetBSD/vax. > > Well, that???s . . . awkward :-)
The executable may not be built, but don't the drivers (or the disklabel code -- yow!!) still respect the bad sector lists? The most likely use I can see for STD 144 handling in the kernel is if one needs to read a disk, or even a disk image, which has sectors reallocated using this mechanism. For example, trying to recover an RL02 pack that had sectors spared out before it was last written, or an image of such a pack, is going to return errors or bogus data by reading the spared sectors instead of what they were remapped to. From the comments in the first BSD version of bad144.c, it appears that "standard formatters" (under RSTS or VMS?) would usually have tested the media and written this information, so the kernel support even in the very beginning was much more important than the Unix utility. A middle ground between effectively putting this back into the individual drivers whence it came and ripping it out totally might be to add a utility that reads the remapping data, and then constructs a disk image that doesn't need it. Thor
