In some mail I received from Bill Studenmund, sie wrote
> 
> On Sun, 22 Jun 1997, Darren Reed wrote:
> 
> > Ummm, I think we have three things being handled here then (well, on this
> > subject anyway ;)
> > 
> > 1: accessing non-BSD fdisk-partitions.
> > 2: allowing 16 partitions inside a BSD fdisk-partition.
> > 3: using 32 bits for minor #'s rather than 16 bits.
> > 
> > Doing 3 will help 1 & 2, but doing 2 won't solve 1.
> 
> But 2 will help 1. As port i386 only has four "free" partitions (a is
> root, b swap, c is whole BSD, and d is whole disk), needing one of these 4
> slots to get at a DOS partition is limiting (you can't have /usr, /tmp,
> /var, and /home all on seperate partitions w/ a DOS partition around).

No, 2 doesn't help 1.  If you can have > 16 logical partitions (inside either
DOS extended partitions, other BSD partitions, SVR4 partitions, etc), then
even upping the limit to 4 provides little benefit.

Darern