ronald@demon.net writes:
> What's being proposed here ?  I see two possible options for this:
> 
> a) Teach the kernel to understand the FDISK partitions and make them
>    available under a different set of minor numbers

"Sort of". Actually, we have been thinking of re-implementing the
FreeBSD "slice" mechanism. It isn't the prettiest thing in the world,
but it is pretty decent for handling this problem. We need to be able
to cope with MBR partitions on Alphas and PowerPC boxes, too, so it
would probably be a win.

> Only (a) requires kernel familiarity, but I would hope the netbsd
> community to oppose this one strongly on the grounds of not
> bloating the kernel where userland work would do as well.

Userland can't really cope with it well, actually. Consider the
problem of having a NetBSD and FreeBSD MBR "slice" on the same disk
and wanting to access all of the FreeBSD partitions -- or wanting to
have a second NetBSD "slice" on one disk. You just can't do that with
our current label mechanism. There simply aren't enough slots in the
NetBSD partition table -- can't be! -- and it isn't clear that not
understanding the MBR information is in our interest anyway.

Perry