Subject: Re: kern/2759: vnd doesn't support disklabel ioctls
To: None <netbsd-bugs@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Andreas Gustafsson <gson@araneus.fi>
List: netbsd-bugs
Date: 06/08/1997 15:43:32
jonathan@netbsd1.cygnus.com said:
>> If you apply the patches in my PR 1367, though, you'll be able to newfs
>> the vnd anyway, and once you have a filesystem there, you can mount it
>> and use it for most things without needing a disklabel.
> 
>Most things, yes, but not binding bootable disk images and miniroots,
>which was the reason I was using vnd in the first place ;).

The OpenBSD vnd driver (in the trunk of their anoncvs tree) supports
disklabels.  It is trivial to back-port to NetBSD (at least to 1.2).
It does have the bug of ignoring the partition offsets in the
disklabel (causing all the partitions to look identical to the raw
partition), but that bug is not that hard to fix, either.

I have successfully used the OpenBSD driver under NetBSD 1.2 to mount
an MSDOS file system residing in an 800 MB file containing a
bit-for-bit copy of the disk from a WIN95 machine.
-- 
Andreas Gustafsson, gson@araneus.fi