When setting disk geometry with the geometry control message, the arguments are sectors, sector size, cylinders, heads, and sectors per track. The last three may be zero for LBA disk simulations, but must be present.

The -f option causes disksim to use file as the initial contents of the disk rather than a zeroed image. Changes made to the disk are written back to file unless the -r option is given.

The -s option causes disksim to post its 9P service at /srv/service.

aux/disksim echo geometry 40000 512 0 0 0 >/dev/sdXX/ctl # 20MB disk/mbr /dev/sdXX/data disk/fdisk -baw /dev/sdXX/data disk/prep /dev/sdXX/plan9

Disksim is useful for creating very large but mostly zeroed files for testing other programs. Test tar(1)'s handling of large files:

for(i in sdXX sdYY sdZZ) aux/disksim $i echo geometry 40000000 512 0 0 0 >/dev/sdXX/ctl # 20GB echo geometry 10000000 512 0 0 0 >/dev/sdYY/ctl # 5GB echo geometry 20000000 512 0 0 0 >/dev/sdZZ/ctl # 10GB tar cf /dev/sdXX/data /dev/sdYY/data /dev/sdZZ/data tar tvf /dev/sdXX/data