Re: Filesystem creation

Alan Cox
2002-05-13T23:52:31Z

> 2. How hard would it be to make mkfs take as its size parameter
> the number reported by fdisk and calculate the size it needs
> from that rather than expect the user to do the calculation
> instead?

That would break the expected but daft old Unix API

> 3. How hard would it be to fix ELKS so the size doesn't need to
> be specified, either by getting the block devices to update
> the blk_sizes array or by whatever other means are required?
> This way, the whole problem just vanishes.

You can fill in the block sizes for each partition by reading the
partition table. In the ELKS case I'd argue that mkfs ought to figure
out the primary device, and do the partition table read itself simply
because kernel space is precious and only mkfoo need to know