Ted Lemon writes:
> Hm.   Having read this paragraph, it occurred to me that it might be a
> mistake to try to solve the DOS partition problem with a single
> partition table - it might make more sense to have two levels of
> partitioning that are recognized by the i386 kernel.   If you have a
> drive that's got a DOS partition and a NetBSD partition, perhaps it
> would be addressable as /dev/sd0* and /dev/sd1*, where sd0* would be
> the first partition in the DOS table, and sd1 would be the second.
> I'm not saying this would be the precise implementation - I can see a
> lot of problems with what I just described - but something along these
> lines might be a good solution.

The FreeBSD "slice" notation seems to be the current consensus. In it,
my DOS partition in MBR slot 0 would be sd0s0c -- my boot partition on
the NetBSD slice would be sd0s1a.

Its not perfect, but its better than what we have now, and its
reasonably compatible with FreeBSD's notation which isn't any worse
than any other notation we could use.

We need to move to 32 bit device numbers first, though -- the current
16 bit ones aren't going to be sufficient.

Perry