Re: Wedges enabled on -current

["Thomas Mueller" <mueller6724%bellsouth.net@localhost>]

> Now that we have branched 7, I am planning to enable full wedge support for
> kernels that used wedges before. What this means is that disks with mbr and
> bsd labels will now create dkN devices for each partition in found. This
> should be generally transparent, because fstab offers backwards compatibility
> support. I.e. in the general case, your machine should boot and work fine
> without requiring any changes. There are some corner cases:

>       - there are not enough dk devices in /dev
>         (you can use MAKEDEV to create more)
>       - scripts that refer directly to "sd" "wd" "raid" etc devices
>         might break.
>       - your userland is from NetBSD-6 and a not recent (as of 6 months
>         ago current).
>       - something that we have not encountered before.

> If things don't work for you, please file a PR with a description of your
> setup and how it fails, so we can fix it.

> If things work fine for you, you should eventually edit your fstab and
> modify your entries to be of the form NAME=<partition-name> instead of
> hard-coded devices (yes, for the traditional partition schemes these
> are the names of the devices...).

I've used NAME=<partition-name> in /etc/fstab and mount commands with NetBSD 
6.99.x: works with GPT but not MBR.

Also, NAME does not work with mount_msdos as in
mount_msdos NAME=WD2G02 /media/zip0  # does not work, but
mount -t msdos NAME=WD2G02 /media/zip0  # good

My NetBSD-current amd64 (6.99.44) on USB stick became corrupted with unreadable 
sectors, so I installed anew, for both amd64 and i386, onto hard drive 
partitions, building from NetBSD-6.99.44 i386 on USB stick, with src tree, xsrc 
and pkgsrc also on hard drive, FreeBSD partition.

It was August 11, and I was expecting 6.99.49 or 6.99.50 but got 7.99.1 (I knew 
the branching was nigh), which is where I am now.

I really like partition names in Linux better, and FreeBSD still better, with 
disk name followed by partition number, rather than one string of dk wedges 
(NetBSD) or drive letters (DOS, OS/2, eComStation, MS-Windows).  OpenBSD is off 
my charts for lack of GPT support.

Mobile racks, USB drives and eSATA hard-drive enclosures can upset wedge 
numbers or DOS-style (including OS/2, eComStation and Windows) drive letters.

I checked out netbsd-7 src and xsrc just a couple hours ago, am not really 
decided between releng-7 and HEAD (7.99.x), but am of the impression that there 
is no going back from 7.99.1, I'd have to install 7.0_BETA fresh on a new 
partition, but have plenty of space on 3 TB hard drive.

I've given up on NetBSD 6.x and 5.x.

Tom