I think I mostly agree with what you're proposing, except that you seem
to think that using on-disk partitions excludes 'LVM' type usage that
uses config files.

The basic idea is that some userspace program pushes partition info into
the kernel, and the kernel assigns this to the appropriate device nodes.
If you simply reserve a class of device nodes as the 'no partition' type,
people can go the config file route as well. If they want to, why not?
It can certainly be useful. We won't use it by default, I suppose, but
giving people the option is trivial. The only difference is that the
partition info happens to be in a config file, instead of in an on-disk
format someplace.

Getting back to the original plan, I think that there are 2 things we
can start doing, since they will be needed in all cases under discussion:

	1) Write a library and tool that knows about all partition
	   formats, and can manipulate them, in both big- and little
	   endian byteorder. As a sample usage, write a program that
	   grovels a disk, and spits out offsets and types of partitions.
	   (mbrlabel can be used for this, for example, other platforms
	   may have other tools).

	2) Bump daddr_t to 64 bits in the kernel, and make that work.

- Frank

-- 
Frank van der Linden                                    fvdl@wasabisystems.com
==============================================================================
Quality NetBSD Development, Support & Service.   http://www.wasabisystems.com/