> Seems to me the clean solution is to have a boot partition and a swap
> partition, as some systems do.

You mean a separate partition containing exactly and only the label and
boot area?

> This does use up a partition, which brings up something I've been
> wondering about awhile: why do we have a limit of only 8 partitions?
> And how much grief would it be to expand this to, say, 16?

It would be completely impossible for boot disks on ports that are
stuck with compatability disklabels for their boot disks...like my
favorites, the sparc and sun3 ports, where the boot disk's label has to
be acceptable to the ROMs.

Also, at least the sparc and sun3 compatability labels force you to
begin partitions on cylinder boundaries.

But even aside from those, this really doesn't help; it just pushes the
problem off to the user, who then has to know enough to avoid placing
the swap partition overlapping the boot stuff.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu