On Oct 5, 12:51pm, Bill Studenmund wrote:
} On Mon, 5 Oct 1998, Greg A. Woods wrote:
} > [ On Mon, October 5, 1998 at 11:04:00 (-0700), Bill Studenmund wrote: ]
} > 
} > Sure, it would be cool to have an operating system that you could plug
} > any old disk into and be able to read the data from it.  That's sort of
} > where you could go if you added native fdisk support not only to the
} > i386 kernel, but to all of them.  I could then take a Linux/OS2/NT disk
} > and mount all the partitions from it on my sparcstation.
} 
} To be blunt, given how multi-platform NetBSD is, I think we SHOULD be able
} to take any disk from any machine we support and stick it in any other. As
} you mention below, we don't need to support everything in every kernel.
} But we need the support.

     I agree that this would be very nice.  The question is how to do
this without excessively bloating the kernel.  One way would be to
defopt it.  Another would be Charle's slices proposal.  The second
question is how do we name these partitions (and, you {general you}
thought we were having big flame wars over device naming now)?

} The place things will get harry (and which is another thread) is when we
} support MBR's in MBR's or any other layering where the partition layout is
} generated from multiple (recursed>) disklabels.

     This is precisely how MS-DOS extended partitions work.  If we
want to fully support MS-DOS partitions then we have to deal with
this.  Here's another fun one to be named.  Although, we could deal
with extended partitions as children of their root partition.

}-- End of excerpt from Bill Studenmund