On Thu, 2 Oct 1997 16:55:13 +0300 
 Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi> wrote:

 > 1. Will 1.3 still have the limit of 8 partitions / disk (on i386 port
 >    specifically)?  This limit gets worse by the growing disk sizes.

Yes.  Changing the MAXPARTITIONS value is a somewhat serious undertaking,
and is going to require some planning.  Basically, that's going to make
minor numbers incompatible (i.e. what was sd1a will actually be sd0i).  If
we're going to make them incompatible, we should make them incompatible
in a detectable way - by switching to a different dev_t format, which is
something we plan on doing anyhow, after 1.3.

There are other problems - double the number of partitions, halve the number
of available disk units.  For some of us, this poses a _real_ practical
problem (there is a machine sitting in a development lab here, running
NetBSD, w/ > 1T of disk on it, and we _NEED_ the SCSI disk unit numbers).

...This is another reason for a different dev_t format.

There is a somewhat hackish way around the "cripes, I'm out of partitions"
problem... you could make a ccd out of a single component (one of your
disks's "large" partitions), and then partition the ccd - you could
theoretically nest this multiple times :-)

 > 2. Will 1.3 have a complete locale support with 8-bit aware ctype/string
 >    macros and libc routines?  I assume this change was/would be a relatively
 >    small one.. but extremely useful for us non-English-speaking users.

Erg, Christos and Klaus did some work on this, IIRC... did it not get
finished?

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                            Home: +1 408 866 1912
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