On Mon, 15 Jan 2001, Martijn van Buul wrote:

> Bill Studenmund wrote:
> > ?? "Share an HFS partition"? Our disklabel reading code is the same for
> > both, so NetBSD will read Apple partition maps. If you create APPLE_SVR2
> > partitions (like NetBSD/mac68k does), they will work as NetBSD ffs
> > partitions.
> 
> Hmm. Care to elaborate? I tried this, but NetBSD insisted on scribbling
> a disklabel.

What were you doing that it insisted on scribbling a disklabel? Using
sysinst?

While the macppc kernel supports living with Apple partition map drives,
sysinst doesn't and insists on writing a disklabel.

> Hmm. Maybe I'm just too old-fashioned; maybe NetBSD can live without
> disklabels..

You're touching on a discussion which has a semantic niggle: there's a
conceptual difference between a bsd disklabel, which is a particular way
to store partition info on disk, and a struct disklabel in the kernel
which tells the live kernel where to look for different partitions. In the
past the same structure was used for both, and so supporting things like
the Apple partition map didn't work well.

NetBSD will always need something to tell it where the partitions are, a
"disklabel" if you will. However it won't always need a bsd disklabel on
the disk. :-)

Take care,

Bill