I have two questions regarding the vnd driver in NetBSD 1.3:

1. What exactly is the "historical reason" referred to in
the following comment in /usr/src/sys/dev/vnd.c?

		/*
		 * For historical reasons, if there's no disklabel
		 * present, all partitions must be FS_BSDFFS and
		 * occupy the entire disk.
		 */

The reason I ask is that this "historical" behaviour actually comes at
the cost of disabling useful functionality.  For example, on the i386,
you can mount MSDOS partitions from an unlabelled hard disk image,
but only after removing the code immediately following the above comment.


2.  What exactly does the following line in /usr/src/distrib/miniroot/Makefile
(and several other distrib Makefiles) do?

	cat /*bin/* > /dev/null

I suspect the answer may include a reference to a deficiency of the
vnd driver.  If so, shouldn't said deficiency be documented in the
BUGS section of the vnd(4) man page?
-- 
Andreas Gustafsson, gson@araneus.fi