First peripherally: 2015-10-05 17:58 GMT+08:00 Jason McIntyre <j...@kerhand.co.uk>:
> we're not talking about the list in fstab(5)? > http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man5/fstab.5?query=fstab&arch=i386 Nice but it misses the 4.2BSD and RAID types. Then centrally: 2015-10-05 17:14 GMT+08:00 Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de>: > Mikael, why do you ask? What is the actual problem you want to > solve? Read a disk that nobody touched for 35 years? Write a disk > that can be read by a machine which hadn't its operating system > upgraded for 35 years? > > If it's just "i have no special needs but i can configure something > here but i don't know the options", i'd recommend you just stop > worrying and don't touch the defaults. In general, in particular > with low-level tools like this, in particular when it's not even > documented, the message the developers are trying to send is "use > the defaults unless you have very special needs and you know what > you are doing". Nothing interesting to see here, move on... > 2015-10-05 18:25 GMT+08:00 Ted Unangst <t...@tedunangst.com>: > the lack of documentation may be an oversight, but i can't imagine why one > would neet to know. if curious, refer to the source. if trying to solve a > problem, picking the obvious name will likely work. if there are values you > don't know about, you probably don't have a use for them. > Indeed I didn't get to this question with a "good" reason - I wanted to learn backwards how keydisks *might* be loaded, as that is undocumented (too). However, with this said, In such a central aspect of the system as the disk slicing/labelling, I think it's reasonable to have some kind of suggestion or documentation of at least what would be included in normal usecases; The way it is now is that as user you learn to know that "4.2BSD" and "swap" are possible options, because the "a" option will insinuate those through its default setting. And, as soon as you dig into the softraid docs, you get mentionings that there's a label of type "RAID" too, and you try to type it in and it works, And last you type in gibberish and it gives you "undefined", so that way you learn of in total four options. I don't know about you but I can feel this as a bit much "black box" behavior, so just a little bit more documentation somewhere would be fantastic. Just the "man disklabel" saying something like "FS type" is generally "BSD4.2" for all partitions except for b which should "swap", and you might want "RAID" too, and if you need a raw blob then use "[ SOMETHING ]". (Also CD ISO99.. and FAT, noo???) Other than this don't experiment as there's a lot of legacy about this setting. (and perhaps typing in "?" in the "FS type" input in the disklabel program) would be helpful! (Without getting into undefined territory where you'd risk messing up 35 year old exotic conventions etc.)
