Re: aliasing (or renaming) kern.geom.debugflags

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk_at_mit.edu> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I feel like this has come up before, but a quick search didn't reveal
> anything terribly recent, at least.
>
> The new installation chapter of the handbook for 9.0 (that Warren and Glen
> and Garrett and Gavin and more people I am probably missing have sunk huge
> amounts of time into) has instructions on (e.g.) preparing a USB stick
> install image:
> http://www.glenbarber.us/FreeBSD9/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-pre.html
> (scroll down most of the way).  But in order to do so, the instructions
> include 'sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16'!  Now, an ordinary user who is
> doing this for the first time might ask, "why do I need to do something with
> 'debugflags' in order to make a USB stick?  I'm not debugging anything, this
> is a standard operation!".
>
> I can't really advocate for changing the geom logic at this point in the
> release cycle (though it's not really clear why rank 1 geom providers need
> to be so special), but I think it would be nice to have a user-visible
> interface to it that does not have "debug" in the name, since the actual
> flags are apparently here for the long haul.  I could certainly imagine
> aliasing the debugflags to just "flags", which seems more
> innocuous-sounding.
>
> Does this sound crazy?

Yes. From geom(4):

DIAGNOSTICS
     Several flags are provided for tracing GEOM operations and unlocking pro-
     tection mechanisms via the kern.geom.debugflags sysctl.  All of these
     flags are off by default, and great care should be taken in turning them
     on.

geom(4) has more details about what they do.

Thanks,
-Garrett