> That's always seemed either like "magic" numbers, or inappripriate
> overloading to me.  It's one thing to have a "convention" where a
> certain slice represents the entire physical device, but yet another
> thing entirely to encode that convention into the driver.  I'd much
> rather see another minor number used to represent the raw disk,
> especially since there's no big shortage of them any more.

Ooh, I would love to see this. I've always hated the "in-band" characteristic
of the 'c' and 'd' conventions. It would provide an MI-acceptable way of
getting these things out of the partition table, so that we could use the
same device names on all ports without worrying.

In the future I would really like to see compat code that lets us mount disks
across all ports, and that means grokking i386 "doslabels" and Apple's own
partition format (another c/d situation?) in an MI manner.

Anything that moves us away from implicitly used letters and toward
documented partition types makes sense to me too.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com