The "additional complication" is DOS, BIOS and MBR, not the BSD 
disklabels. (And of course other PC-centric operating systems, which 
implements the same DOS partition table.)

NetBSD have a disklabel on every disk, same no matter what hardware. 
It's just that on a PC there might be some other software that expects 
another type of partition table, and that's where you get the additional 
complication.

So NetBSD can live with that. It don't really care about the MBR 
partition table, but the BSD disk label, and partitions can be placed so 
that the MBR don't get clobbered. As others have pointed out, the BSD 
disklabel still covers the whole disk. It's the other systems that need 
to be told that there is a NetBSD partition on the disk, so that they 
don't clobber it. NetBSD really don't care about the MBR partition 
table. It is not used.

	Johnny

Zbigniew Baniewski wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 08:41:23AM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 
> 
>>my opinion is that on an i386 one should use the fdisk partition table to
>>make life easier.
> 
> 
> My problem was, that I wanted to have 3 OS-es on the disk: FreeDOS, Linux   
> (together with swap it makes 2 more partitions), and NetBSD.
>    
> Yes, I was able to use disklabel - although I can't understand the
> benefits(?) of such additional complication. What for? Just because a long  
> time ago in such way it was made on the PDP-11?

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol