Re: Removing fdisk and bsdlabel (legacy partition tools)

On 24/01/2024 19:50, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 8:45?AM Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>>> MBR (PC BIOS) partition tables were historically maintained with
>>> fdisk(8), but gpart(8) has long been the preferred method for working
>>> with partition tables of all types. fdisk has been declared as
>>> obsolete in the man page since 2015. Similarly BSD disklabels were
>>> historically maintained with bsdlabel. It does not yet have a
>>> deprecation notice - I have proposed a man page addition in
>>> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D43563.
> 
> man page additions are not going to reach the people who may be
> using this.  This should be a gonein(15) added to the binary.
> I also suspect that all of the people doing ufs installs
> are doing so via bsdlabel, not gpart.

I have many FreeBSD installations running in a UFS-based VM, created 
using bsdinstall or manually using gpart. I haven't touched fdisk and 
bsdlabel in at least a decade.

>>> I would like to disconnect these from the build, and subsequently
>>> remove them. This is prompted by a recent bsdlabel bug report which
>>> uncovered a longstanding buffer overflow in that tool. Effort is much
>>> better focused on contemporary, maintained tools rather than
>>> investigating issues in deprecated ones. Removing these tools would
>>> happen in FreeBSD 15 only (no change in 14 or 13).
>>>
>>> Code review to disconnect fdisk: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D43575
> 
> How can you do bsdlabel -A -e /dev/foo with gpart?  As far as I know
> that functionality never made it to gpart, neither the -A or -e.

I was curious what this command does that is so special, but it seems to 
be of no use anymore:

% bsdlabel -A /dev/ada0 

bsdlabel: disks with more than 2^32-1 sectors are not supported

Do we really need a tool that can't handle disks of average size (in 
this case 4TB)?

Kind regards
Miroslav Lachman