Thank you, PlukoMandy,
umm, maybe you misunderstood me, i like to know if is there any known
blocking thing, what let us not switch from BFS to ZFS? I like BFS,
and don't want to change it, but it is pretty slow (or is it just the
Tracker?). Is there any way to speed it up? Maybe with disabled debug
or something?
Thanks and i hope we'll meet in Düsseldorf again!
Bye,
--Z.
2015-10-21 19:11 GMT+02:00 Adrien Destugues <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxx>:
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 04:28:20PM +0200, miqlas wrote:
Hi Guys,
i have a question and i hope somebody can give me an short explnation:
I've seen in mailing list and forums, that there are some peoples, who
doesn't creating any partitioning systems on his drives, just using
the whole disk as BFS disk.
I never did it yet, first, because i had always multi-boot
environment, second: i always thought it is a requiment, so i was a
bitsurprised to hear, that it is actually possible.
But i have some question:
- what are the benefits to using the whole disk as BFS? Is there any gains?
- are the Haiku bootloader capable too boot a disk without partition scheme?
- doesn't make it the recovery impossible? (there is plenty good disk
diag-recovery tools in the wild and i'm not sure if they can work with
whole-disk-BFS)
There is not much to win, usually. Here is a list of the pros and cons:
+ You free up about 2 kilobytes of space at the start of the disk
+ You skip one step in booting (you get straight to the stage1 loader,
instead of going through the MBR first). It is slightly faster and may
avoid problems if the MBR doesn't work
+ No need to use "makebootable", because the partition offset is
already correct (it is 0).
- You cannot use an MBR (our own BootMan is one, but also many other
bootloaders)
- You cannot have multiple partitions for different systems on the disk
- Some BIOSes will not allow booting from a drive, if there is no
partition table
As for recovery: if your tool can handle BFS, it does not matter wether
the filesystem starts at offset 0 or in the middle of the drive. If your
tool doesn't handle BFS, it will probably scan the whole disk for what
looks like known file headers.
Something else: is there any plan for improving the BFS? I heard, many
people like to see ZFS in Haiku. Is it possible (theoretically) to
swap the BFS code to ZFS [hex 42 -> 5a :) ].
Haiku supports several filesystems (NTFS, EXT2/3, …). Adding ZFS is
possible if someone wants to work on that. "improving BFS" is harder
because the on-disk structure leave little room for changes. Designing a
new filesystem (BFS2?) is the current plan, but this is definitely an R2
project.
--
Adrien.
