Change the defaults for newfs to disregard the geometry in the disklabel.

We pretend we have one head with two megabyte worth of sectors per cylinder.

The code try to access another head in what it belives to the same
physical cylinder, because it belives that it would be faster than
waiting for the next free sector under this head to come around.

Most modern drives doesn't have a "classical" geometry, and thus
we end up fooling ourselves doing the above optimization.  With this
change we will fill a cylinder sequentially if we can, and thus get
much more mileage from the track-buffer/cache built into the drives.

As a result a lot of seeks to the next or previous track should be
avoided by this.

(My disk is a lot less noisy actually...)

You can still get the old behaviour, by specifying zero for the
numbers.

This will also solve the problem with newfs barfing at really big
drives.

Obtained from:	adult advice from Kirk.

2 files changed, 18 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/sbin/newfs/newfs.8 b/sbin/newfs/newfs.8
index e342516bc048..5ab5a595bca0 100644
--- a/sbin/newfs/newfs.8
+++ b/sbin/newfs/newfs.8
@@ -87,8 +87,7 @@ or
 the disk must be labeled using 
 .Xr disklabel 8 .
 .Nm Newfs
-builds a file system on the specified special device
-basing its defaults on the information in the disk label.
+builds a file system on the specified special device.
 Typically the defaults are reasonable, however
 .Nm newfs
 has numerous options to allow the defaults to be selectively overridden.
@@ -232,9 +231,13 @@ The speed of the disk in revolutions per minute.
 .It Fl t Ar #tracks/cylinder
 The number of tracks/cylinder available for data allocation by the file
 system.
+The default is 1.
+If zero is specified, the value from the disklabel will be used.
 .It Fl u Ar sectors/track
 The number of sectors per track available for data allocation by the file
 system.
+The default is 4096.
+If zero is specified, the value from the disklabel will be used.
 This does not include sectors reserved at the end of each track for bad
 block replacement (see the
 .Fl p
diff --git a/sbin/newfs/newfs.c b/sbin/newfs/newfs.c
index effb821f635f..cb6bf3594374 100644
--- a/sbin/newfs/newfs.c
+++ b/sbin/newfs/newfs.c
@@ -144,13 +144,24 @@ void	fatal();
  */
 #define	NRPOS		1	/* number distinct rotational positions */
 
+/*
+ * About the same time as the above, we knew what went where on the disks.
+ * no longer so, so kill the code which finds the different platters too...
+ * We do this by saying one head, with a lot of sectors on it.
+ * The number of sectors are used to determine the size of a cyl-group.
+ * Kirk suggested one or two meg per "cylinder" so we say two.
+ */
+
+#define NTRACKS		1	/* number of heads */
+
+#define NSECTORS	4096	/* number of sectors */
 
 int	mfs;			/* run as the memory based filesystem */
 int	Nflag;			/* run without writing file system */
 int	Oflag;			/* format as an 4.3BSD file system */
 int	fssize;			/* file system size */
-int	ntracks;		/* # tracks/cylinder */
-int	nsectors;		/* # sectors/track */
+int	ntracks = NTRACKS;	/* # tracks/cylinder */
+int	nsectors = NSECTORS;	/* # sectors/track */
 int	nphyssectors;		/* # sectors/track including spares */
 int	secpercyl;		/* sectors per cylinder */
 int	trackspares = -1;	/* spare sectors per track */