make up as you go along?

[David Chmelik]

We bought new laptop (kept old including spare/slower, and interesting/
slowest with LibreBoot)... after installing/upgrading FreeBSD more times
on these, noticed something weird.
Fdisk was replaced by gpart... however uses different SSD/M2/NVMe
names than fstab--if one tries 'gpart show <device>' for device name
(without partition/slice) in fstab, gpart won't show (one does I haven't
found how to show extended partitions, though can mount).
Is fact of not having same device names ahead of time in design/plan/
standard, and the switch to git, evidence of switch to 'make up as you go
along' computer programming method used such as in GNU/Linux? It's also
known as waterfall versus agile software engineering methods or 'The
Cathedral And The Bazaar'. I depended on UNIX/*BSD decades to be more
stable/clean including more understandable than much else, but (as in case
above, it's becoming less understandable so) maybe this is slowly ending?

[Bob Eager]

These changes happened long ago (years). Do keep up.

Look in /dev to see the names. But I bet it was in release notes long ago.



--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

[Philip Paeps]

David Chmelik <dchm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Fdisk was replaced by gpart...

fdisk is still installed on FreeBSD as of 14.0, and still works within
the limited scope of what it has always supported. gpart is a more
modern (and flexible) implementation with support for more partitioning
schemes found on contemporary computers. gpart is hardly new. It has
been around since FreeBSD 7.0 (2008).

>however uses different SSD/M2/NVMe names than fstab--if one tries
>'gpart show <device>' for device name (without partition/slice) in
>fstab, gpart won't show (one does I haven't found how to show extended
>partitions, though can mount).

FreeBSD releases since 12.0 (2018) include a new direct access driver
for NVMe devices: nda(4). FreeBSD 14.0 (2023) made this the default,
though the nvd(4) driver still exists if you need it.

>Is fact of not having same device names ahead of time in design/plan/
>standard

By default, the nda(4) driver creates aliases in /dev. This helps most
legacy configurations get over the upgrade. If your use case is
sufficiently exotic to need the legacy nda(4) driver for some reason,
you can set the hw.nvme.use_nvd loader tunable.

This is clearly mentioned in the 14.0-RELEASE announcement:

>>NVMe disks are now nda devices by default, for example nda0; see
>>nda(4). Symbolic links for the previous nvd(4) device names are
>>created in /dev. However, configuration such as fstab(5) should be
>>updated to refer to the new device names. Options to control the use
>>of nda devices and symbolic links are described in nda(4).
>>bdc81eeda05d (Sponsored by Netflix)

Philip