Hello.

While we're talking about increasing the number of partitions on a disk,
I have a thought.

How handy it could be if NetBSD directly used the DOS disk partitions.
Perhaps we call them slices.  Each slice is either a primary or
extended DOS partition.  Each slice would then contain either a
pseudo NetBSD disklabel which would map the entire DOS partition (to be
used if that area contains, for example, a MS-DOS or ext2fs filesystem),
or a real NetBSD disklabel which would have 8 or 16 partitions.  There 
could be multiple partitions with NetBSD disklabels on one disk.

This would make it much easier to share NetBSD on a disk with other
operating systems, giving us the ability to at least easily reference
all the DOS partitions on a disk, and give us lots of expandability
for those upcoming 100GB disks.

Since this would change a lot of things, there's also the opportunity
to come up with a special way to reference the raw partition, and perhaps
free up the c and d partitions for regular use.

I think all of these ideas have come up before, separately.

-- Chuck