On Sat, 11 Apr 1998, David A. Gatwood wrote:

> On Thu, 9 Apr 1998, Michael R Zucca wrote:
> 
> > Well, we'd need three more things:
> > 
> > - The ability to partition a drive using MacOS style partitions from
> >   NetBSD.
> >   This requires some additions to the kernel.
> 
> What sort of additions?  Is this the "writing disklabels" discussion
> again?  Is there an ioctl or anything to force NetBSD to re-read the
> partition table?  If there were, is there any chance pdisk could be
> ported?

The problem is that NetBSD can only really deal with one partition type at
a time. Well, each port has its own scheme (some can support a "NetBSD"
and a "Vendor OS" table format). The better thing would be for us to be
able to support many formats in one system. Then all ports could read
MacOS tables, Atari tables, MBR, etc...

> > - The ability to access HFS partitions in some manner.
> >   A special program built around a read-only HFS module (like the old HFS
> >   program) could be used for install purposes. Though a full-blown file
> >   system would be nice.
> 
> You want to talk about bizarre... I looked in the Mach Kernel from MkLinux
> in the hopes of porting that (read-only) HFS code to NetBSD....  It's
> literally a wrapper around hfsutils.  The Mach Kernel apparently has a
> means of accessing a filesystem on a file-by-file basis w/o knowing about
> the structure of the filesystem... and that takes advantage of it.  No
> chance that NetBSD has any capability like that, is there?

NetBSD has the same type of setup. They're called vnodes. :-)

I thought hfsutils had some sort of licensing restriction...

Take care,

Bill