Cylinder boundaries in 4.3BSD

[der Mouse]

In article <8843 at eddie.MIT.EDU>, nessus at athena.mit.edu (Doug Alan) writes:
> That will work, but you still have the problem that your partitions
> are not beginning at the beginning of cylinders.  This messes up the
> Berkeley Fast File System's perfomance fine-tuning.

What we do in this case is to change the partition table so the
partitions *do* begin on cylinder boundaries.  Just be careful to give
the proper nsect and ntrak numbers to mkfs when you make the filesystem
on the resulting partition.

By the way, does anyone have a program to run standalone (single-user)
which does disk accesses, times them, and tries to guess the geometry
of the disk from the timing data?  Or guesses the geometry by any other
means, for that matter?  We have a MicroVAX disk which claims to be an
RA81 but is 277712 sectors (2*2*2*2*17*1021).

					der Mouse

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			arpa: mouse at larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu