On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 12:04:58AM -0500, James wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> I am happily running XFS on my main home file server (intel), and am thinking
> about using XFS on my new ( for me, anyway) Sparcstation 5, it will be a
> couple of small partitions less than 5gig each, that will house a small news
> feed, is XFS (cvs) ready/compatible with Sparc's running Linux ?
one problem i can think of is the way sparcs are partitioned and how
the bootloader (silo) works... correct me if im wrong anywhere i don't
own a sparc and have only done a couple installs (plain ext2) on them.
in all the install docs ive read your told to create the first
partition (the root partition) starting at cylinder 0, this has the
affect of the partition table (which is also at cylinder 0) being ON
the root partition, this normally isn't a problem since with ext2 the
first 2 blocks are unused to make room for bootloaders generally.
so from what i can tell the partition table is on the first 512 byte
block, and the silo first stage goes in the second 512 byte block,
ext2 doesn't care since that 1k is its unused space for bootloaders.
XFS however has no such space, its superblock (or something) starts
right at the very start of the partition, so if you partition the way
all the docs say to and intend to make your root partition XFS the
partition table will be destroyed the moment you create the XFS
filesystem.
an obvious (to me) solution would simply be don't create the first
partition on cylinder 0, but i imagine there is some reason why all
the docs say to do that (something to do with silo?) someone with
more knowledge of sparcs would have to comment, but it seems XFS on
root is not possible on sparcs. silo would also be unable to read its
configuration file since it currently doesn't support xfs. another
possibility is putting a ext2 /boot partition first and then telling
silo to read its config from there instead.
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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