Excerpts from netbsd: 19-Feb-98 Re: IMPORTANT: new partitio.. Brian
Stark@siemens-psc. (1359*)

> How will this affect users who upgrade to the next release of NetBSD 
> when it is available? 

The transition is not hard, the upgrade procedure will
deal with it.

> Does this mean that when I 
> boot a 1.4 kernel my system will be dead? I hope the COMPAT_386BSD_MBRPART 
> option will be a default option in the next release if this is the case.

The GENERIC/INSTALL kernel should contain this
option to allow simple upgrades.

> Another thing I am wondering about, is why was this change necessary? 
> Does NetBSD want to have its own ID number, or is there new functionality 
> associated with this change?

There is no change in functionality yet.
The "separate ID" topic came up several times because
people wanted to have both NetBSD and FreeBSD on their
disks. We could try to make our boot process and partition
identification more clever (magic numbers or so) to allow
NetBSD to find its partition safely. But this is useless if the
other OS doesn't use similar algorithms and picks the
wrong one.

best regards
Matthias