I have, however, been toying with adding a 'hw.alldisknames' and
   keeping the components out of 'hw.disknames'.  (Toying with as in
   I have it working here, but I haven't decided if I really like the
   idea of changing the semantics of hw.disknames like that).


one thing to keep in mind for here is that while bios raid uses the
whole disk, raidframe doesn't.  it's not that unusual for a disk to
have direct & raid partitions on it... but fortunately rf has root
device detection built in these days.


(i thought there was a method to find the size of a disk but maybe
i'm thinking of partitions...)


.mrg.