Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 22nd May 2007 21:05 UTC, submitted by Nix_User
Thread beginning with comment 242813
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 22:23 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 13:38 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 13:30 UTC, submitted by JRepin
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
More News »
Sponsored Links



Member since:
2006-10-08
Your explaination of FreeBSD's and PC-BSD's terminology is completely correct. Let me add and comment to:
"Although, FreeBSD is limited to 4 bootable FreeBSD slices, it can mount more than four slices, be they FreeBSD slices, or slices corresponding to other OS partitioning schemes. In this manner, FreeBSD is far more flexible."
While access to extended partitions is no problem for FreeBSD, its installation requires a primary partition because FreeBSD slices can only be primary partition. Wow, confusing! :-)
FreeBSD does allow you to hold files in partitions and slices, but it does not force you to.
A typical installation could consist of the following partitions:
/dev/ad0s1a = /
/dev/ad0s1b = swap partition
/dev/ad0s1d = /tmp
/dev/ad0s1e = /var
/dev/ad0s1f = /usr
/dev/ad0s1g = /home
According to this example, ad0s1g refers to ATA disk 0, slice 1, partition g. If you want to use a second HD for /home, you could set /dev/ad1s1 = /home (ATA disk 1, slice 1, whole device) or /dev/ad1 = /home (ATA disk 1, whole device). The same way is used to refer to USB sticks formatted as UFS (e. g. /dev/da0), but if they are of msdos format, the reference to the first slice (DOS: the first partition) is needed (e. g. /dev/da0s1). The "c" for "whole device" (e. g. /dev/ad2c) is not needed anymore. You can refer to CD drives in the same way (e. g. /dev/cd0, /dev/acd0t01), so if you record an AVI file to a CD without (!) an ISO-9660 container, you can "mplayer /dev/acd0" to play the disc, but NB most players can't play this strange format; it is possible to use this type of disc if no VCD can be created, but it is not intended to "mount /cdrom && mplayer /cdrom/movie.avi && umount /cdrom".
To repeat: Slices equal DOS partitions, partitions can be compared to logical volumes inside an DOS extended partition. Examples:
HD1 = { (prim 1) (prim 2) }
HD2 = { (prim 1) (ext 1 -lv 1- -lv 2-) }
In FreeBSD, partitions (inside a slice) are used to seperate system components.
HD1 = { (/) swap (/tmp) (/var) (/usr) }
HD2 = { /home }
This leads to advantages (easy backup, improved consistency while HDD problems occur), but disadvantages (no resizing), too. LVM (Vinum) is ready to help here.