On Thu, Jul 29, 1999 at 09:08:39AM -0500, seebs@plethora.net wrote:
> Oh, are they?  Damn.
> 
> Can we *please* get 16 partitions on i386?  I'm already using a, e, f, g, and
> h for "real" partitions.  If 'b' is reserved for swap, 'c' is reserved for
> the whole NetBSD partition, and 'd' is reserved for the entire disk, I can
> only have 5 partitions on a disk, which is *pathetic*.
> 
> (You can tell my first NetBSD system was an amiga...)
> 
> Just out of curiousity, what breaks if we increase the # of partitions?  Have
> we already filled our disklabel block?

The problem is compatibility: if you bump MAXPART to 16, your wd1a is now
wd0i. Immagine your root disk was wd1, you can't mount it any more to create
the new devices.
Now if you create the new devices but still have an old kernel, you have to
use wd0i instead of wd1a. There's no easy way to do the transition.

But if you fully understand what happens you can bump MAXPART to 16 in your
private tree and rebuild the world, you should'nt have any problems once your
/dev/ is in sync with your kernel/binaries.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
--