On Wed, 15 Nov 1995 18:04:10 GMT 
 tsarna@endicor.com (Ty Sarna) wrote:

 > Any disklabel reorganization should strongly consider making support for
 > particular formats machine-independant.  IE, one should be able to put a
 > MS-DOS partitioned hard disk on a NetBSD/sparc and mount the DOS
 > filesystems, etc.  This is especially useful with things like
 > EZ/Zip/Jazz/Floptical drives. It'd be nice to pop a DOS formatted disk
 > into the drive on NetBSD/amiga machine and read it, or pop an Amiga disk
 > into the drive on a PC and mount it's partiton(s) with adosfs, or
 > whatever. This could get difficult with ports like i386 where the raw
 > partition is wierd. (Why isn't c the whole disk and d the NetBSD part?
 > And is there a reason NetBSD partions aren't made as individual
 > partitions in the DOS partition table?)

While this is a worthy goal, it's not really the problem I'm trying to 
solve at the moment.

Several months ago, I was thinking about what might be required to read 
different-endian disklabels.  It actually turned out to be a bit hairy...

Of course, you've also touched on the issue that ffs/adosfs/msdosfs/etc. 
need to understand byteswapping, too.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason R. Thorpe                                         thorpej@Xenotropic.COM

           Just me and my collection of obsolete computer gear(s).