fdisk class not found?

Hi all,
adding a new disk to one of my boxes I did the following:

Code:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 bs=8192
# fdisk -BI ad4
# disklabel -w /dev/ad4s1
# newfs /dev/ad4s1a

The only thing is that fdisk claimed about class not found but did the job anyway. I haven't found an explanation for this, any clue?
 
I know I've seen it do that, but don't recall why, and I'm pretty sure it does not matter.

For the future:
Erasing a whole disk before use is not required. If you want to do that with dd(1), a buffer size of 64k makes it go faster.
Plan on switching to gpart(8), which does everything fdisk(8) and bsdlabel(8) can do but a lot more also.
If the hard drive controller supports it, switching to AHCI gives a performance improvement, something like 10-20%. Probably need FreeBSD 8 or 9 for that.
Using softupdates (-U) with newfs(8) can help performance also.
 
wblock@ said:
I know I've seen it do that, but don't recall why, and I'm pretty sure it does not matter.

I dig a little into the sources and found that the error comes from geom_ctl.c and in particular:

Code:
static void                                                                                
g_ctl_req(void *arg, int flag __unused)                                                    
{                                                                                          
        struct g_class *mp;                                                                
        struct gctl_req *req;                                                              
        char const *verb;                                                                  
                                                                                           
        g_topology_assert();                                                               
        req = arg;                                                                         
        mp = gctl_get_class(req, "class");                                                 
        if (mp == NULL) {                                                                  
                gctl_error(req, "Class not found");                                        
                return;                                                                    
        }

I suspect, since the disk is not yet initialized, that geom is assuming a partition table is there and therefore it can be used as a provider while it is not. But this is just a guess.

wblock@ said:
For the future:
Erasing a whole disk before use is not required. If you want to do that with dd(1), a buffer size of 64k makes it go faster.

Yeah, I know, I was trying to see if erasing the disk was making the error disappear!

wblock@ said:
Plan on switching to gpart(8), which does everything fdisk(8) and bsdlabel(8) can do but a lot more also.
If the hard drive controller supports it, switching to AHCI gives a performance improvement, something like 10-20%. Probably need FreeBSD 8 or 9 for that.
Using softupdates (-U) with newfs(8) can help performance also.

Thanks for the suggestion!
 
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