Re: Filesystem creation

Riley Williams
2002-05-14T06:56:10Z

Hi Alan.

>> 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

The other option would be to give fdisk an option to do the calculation
and display the numbers that mkfs needs...

>> 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

I'm in full agreement with that.

Best wishes from Riley.