On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 29, 1999 at 09:08:39AM -0500, seebs@plethora.net wrote:
> > 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.

The way we're contemplating it is that we would transition to new major
numbers, and have a different unit/partition split on them. Thus the
current wdX[a-h] would ALWAYS refer to the first eight partitions on wdX.

This has been hashed out a lot on tech-kern. The archives are the best
place to see the arguments. :-)

Take care,

Bill