> Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2024 16:21:42 -0500 > From: Thor Lancelot Simon <t...@panix.com> > > On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 09:20:55PM +0000, Taylor R Campbell wrote: > > I think this is a bug, and it would be great if stat(2) just returned > > the physical medium's size in st_size -- currently doing this reliably > > takes at least three different ioctls to handle all storage media, if > > I counted correctly in sbin/fsck/partutil.c's getdiskinfo. > > I am not sure this can be done for all block devices. Tapes have block > devices, and open-reel tape drives do not really know the length of the > loaded media, while on any other tape drive supporting compression, there > may really be no such size.
Sure, it's fine if it doesn't give an answer (or, returns st_size=0) for devices where there's no reasonable answer. But for a medium which does have a definite size that is known up front, it should just be returned by stat(2) in st_size instead of requiring a dance of multiple different NetBSD-specific ioctls to guess at which one will work.
