Re: [9fans] plan9port venti FreeBSD

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

> i wonder how many years it will be before the unix clones undo that
> aspect of the original design that could do with a change?
> you might have thought that devfs would fix it, but no,
> and furthermore, there's still mknod, `to recover deleted device entries'.

I had hopes for Linux, but they seem to have implemented
devfs poorly and then from that experience decided it wasn't
the right way to go after all.

Of course, then there's the fact that plain stat /dev/ad0 doesn't
give you a reasonable size to begin with.

I was partitioning some disks yesterday, and it was much less
frustrating to port Plan 9's fdisk than to use FreeBSD's.

As for the actual topic of this message, I added 4 to the list
of major device numbers but that didn't completely solve
the problem.  Some disks still showed up as having zero size,
presumably because they were unlabeled, and the code uses
the FreeBSD disk label info to determine partition sizes.
If anyone knows how to get the raw disk size out some other
way, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Russ