>> The i386 port is odd in that it has two levels of partitioning;
>
>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.

that's not quite good enough, since sd0* and sd1* already refer to the
first and second scsi drives, respectively.  that sort of notation
would seriously "break" things.

on the other hand, i always wondered if things like /dev/wd0d[0-7]
would't make more sense for accessing the "dos" partitions.  the
mentality being that the dos partitions are accessed via the raw
device.  whether these would be defined in extension to the disklabel
or would just be accessed by the actual partition table would be
subject to discussion.

i, for one, am somewhat "against" just changing the number of
partitions in disklabel from a simple eight to a simple sixteen since
i'd probably just end up cutting up my netbsd partition that much
more.  if you were going to raise the number from eight, i'd probably
wanna raise it to 56, since i could have seven partitions (the eight
being the extended one defining four of the seven) and then i could
slice those all up using disklabels...  :)

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