> I know various PROMware, whose manufacturers (like Sun) shall go
> nameless,

:-)

> make various assumptions along the lines that "All disks have 8
> partitions", but this is a topic that has been discussed but not
> fully addressed.  I know der Mouse has come up with his own solution
> to this problem (hiya, Mouse!).

...did somebody call?

I use principally the sparc and sun3 ports.  Both of these tend to use
Sun-compatible disklabels; I'm not sure whether they *require* it or
not (except for the boot drive, where the PROMs demand it).

I found space within the Sun-style disklabels to tuck 8 more
partitions.  I've got patches to the sparc and sun3 MD disklabel code
to understand and generate such labels, and have also taught my
disk-labeling program "sunlabel" about them.  I've been running with
16-partition disks on NetBSD/sparc and NetBSD/sun3 for, oh, months at
least, I think at least a year.

There's a PR in the database with what were then my patches.  I can
easily supply patches relative to the last source tree I upgraded to,
probably with minimal effort relative to -current.  The biggest problem
is the flag day in /dev.

If and when I start using any other ports more than tangentially, I'm
going to arrange for them to support at least 16 partitions per pack
too; it's just too useful.  Especially now that we have 32-bit dev_ts
and this thus doesn't restrict me to 8 packs per driver!  (Not that
I've felt that limitation yet; the closest is one sun3 machine with
seven 80meg disks...and can't add more 'cause it's a -3/60 and has just
the one (narrow) SCSI controller, with no way to add more (AFAIK).

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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