[TUHS] question about mkfs(8) and stdio

[Michael Sokolov]

Kenneth Stailey <kstailey at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Did stdio buffering change over time?

Line buffering was a Berkeley innovation.  stdout became line-buffered by
default (when it is a terminal) in 4.0BSD.  4.2BSD added setlinebuf(3) to allow
people to make stdout or stderr line-buffered when they want to.  4.3BSD
extended it to work on any stream, not just stdout or stderr.

> If you look at an old BSD mkfs for cylinder-group style file systems (not 7th
> Ed filesystems)

Ahmm, you call that old?  To me it's new...  It's a (wonderful) 4.2BSD
innovation.

> but I have memories that the superblocks were printed out one at a time as if
> fflush(stdout) was called between them rather than one line at a time with
> line-buffered stdio.

I use 4.3BSD-* systems every day and have been for the past several years, and
you can take my word for it that on all 4.3BSD-* systems, including Quasijarus,
plain 4.3, and Ultrix the alternate superblock list output from mkfs/newfs
appears one line at a time on the tty.

> At some point I thought "SysV must have broke this"

I'm curious, where does SysV fit into this?  It's the wonderful 4.2BSD
filesystem a BSD-only thing that Missed'em-five people treated as a satanic
manifestation?

> since newfs would print out
> a complete row of superblock numbers at once with a big delay between the rows

That's exactly what it does.  BTW mkfs = newfs.  mkfs was/is the original UNIX
filesystem creator.  It was almost completely rewritten in 4.2BSD to create the
new filesystems.  At the same time the newfs program was written as a user-
friendly front-end to mkfs (it merely exec'ed mkfs with a bunch of options).
The situation remained in 4.3.  In 4.3-Tahoe/Quasijarus mkfs.c and newfs.c are
compiled and linked into one binary called newfs, CSRG was forced to do this in
order to support disk labels.

MS