> It will ignore the MBR partitions of the other OSs.  Do you really suggest
> that we implement the disklabel scheme of every other OS in the world?
> _In the kernel_?

I'm not going to speak to your other points, but I just wanted to
briefly address this one.   My answer to this question is "sort of."

Properly implemented, code to interpret other O.S.'s MBRs isn't very
big, and to a great extent it can be conditionalised - for example, we
can grok a certain label if support for that FS is included.   I think
that the set of labels that will be supported is going to be limited
to that for which people have some interest, not "every other OS in
the world," but for that set of FS types and disk label types that
people actually care about, yeah, why not support them?

In the particular case of FreeBSD and other BSD operating systems,
interpreting their disk labels is very nearly free, so why not do it?

			       _MelloN_