On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 02:28:48PM -0500, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 07:58:20PM +0100, Pavel Cahyna wrote:
> > Portable as in "you can take a disk from an i386 machine, put it in an
> > alpha and you'll see the NetBSD partitions"? This does not work.
> 
> It doesn't work because of a bug (ports that do not use a machine-dependent
> offset for the disklabel don't look at the locations used by ports that
> do).  Fixing that is about 50 lines of code, and then it All Just Works.  I

Thanks. I don't understand how it would find the sector with the
disklabel, though. Can the alpha kernel read the MBR, find the NetBSD
partition and read the disklabel from it?

> suspect nobody else commits the fixes for the same reason I never do: lack
> of willingness to touch every single port's disksubr.[ch].

Well, somebody else claimed that "<disklabel> simplifies coding of the way
partitions are handled" :-)

Pavel Cahyna