Re: sysinstall says "BARF", concerns libdisk and geom_label

On May 22, 2007, at 6:40 AM, Björn König wrote:

> Hello,
>
> when I start sysinstall I get the error message "BARF 148 <88>". The
> reason for this is the label of my Windows partion, it is called  
> "Windows
> XP" and contains a space character. libdisk/open_disk.c needs to  
> parse the
> value of kern.geom.conftxt which contains spaces as field seperator,
> therefore it fails.
>
> A quick and dirty workaround would be to skip labels that contain  
> space
> characters, which can be easily done in g_label_is_name_ok
> (sys/geom/label/g_label.c).
>
> But I am looking for a better solution. So it might be more  
> accurate to
> revise libdisk, i.e. improve the parsing of kern.geom.conftxt.
>
> Maybe the best but most time-consuming solution is to change the  
> output of
> kern.geom.conftxt to another format, e.g. XML.
>
> Are there any comments or other suggestions?

The major flaw in libdisk is that each platform has its own
set of supported partitioning schemes. With other efforts
underway, we need to stop doing that. I would suggest to
stop using libdisk entirely and instead work on sysinstall
to support partitioning disks based on gpart. That way
every platform can (potentially) create disks with every
partitioning scheme that freebsd supports.

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
xcllnt_at_mac.com