> 
>   I will soon have the opportunity to reinstall netbsd 1.2
>   on a fresh drive, while still having my older drive.
>   I saw mention on this list that the Installer and Mac mkfs
>   utilities know how to create 4.2/4.3 FFS filesystems,
>   while the unix mkfs can do 4.4 FFS filesystems. I
>   have no idea what the difference is (is the FFS on-disk
>   layout still changing?)
> 
>   Can someone explain the benefits/drawbacks of the 4.4 variant
>   on FFS? If I make the filesystem from the unix side will
>   I still be able to use the Installer minishell to cpin and
>   cpout? Are there any other caveats?

AFAIK, the difference is that the 4.4 ffs supports white-outs,
which are used by the unionfs to let you "delete" a file in
a union mount (unionfs mounts can let CD's be "writable" and this
lets you "delete" a file from CDROM).

There might be other changes, like support for 64 bit offsets.

Take care,

Bill