At 1:11 PM 10/7/96, Bill Studenmund wrote:
>>
>> Hi y'all,
>>
>> coming the 'natural' way through the iwm driver (autoconfig code,
>> ioctls, fdopen(), I am digressing a bit at the moment and hacking at the
>> disklabel code. I shall need it soon...
>>
>> I have re-enabled setdisklabel() and writedisklabel() in
>> mac68k/disksubr.c, fixed what I think is a minor bug in readdisklabel(),
>> dropped in some comments and am now able to read and write native
>> disklabels just fine.
>
>What are "native" disklabels? If they're different from Apple's partitioning
>stuff, why do we want them?
>
"Native disklabels" are the native disk partition map used by NetBSD.  You
would see them on either of the Sun ports I expect.

As Allan repeated recently MacBSD uses the "native Apple" disk partition
map because it made it easier to create MacBSD in the first place.  The
current code reads the Apple partition map and constructs a "fake" BSD
disklabel based on it.

Using the Apple partition map also allows you to share a single disk among
MacBSD, MacOS, and A/UX (and MkLinux for that matter).  Since these are the
systems we are most likely to share disks with I actually like the current
set-up.  It also means that the needed information is only stored in one
place and therefore cannot inconsistent.

The down side of the current scheme is that it appears to complicate
dealing with recalcitrant disks like the Zip and EZ135 (I don't have one
myself).  I can see some value to being able to edit the information with
the BSD tools to fix strange configurations.

However I am not sure why any of this is relevant to the IWM driver effort.
I want floppy support mainly so I can trade disks with Mac's and PC's.  Is
there really a native BSD floppy format that requires a disklabel, that
people actually use?  If I were using a floppy to trade data with another
Unix machine I would probably use tar format, not a full formatted BSD
filesystem.

That came out sounding a bit like a tirade.  I don't mean it that way.  I'm
just confused.  Is it easier to support BSDfs than PCfs or tar?

I'm really glad someone is working on an IWM/floppy driver.  Really, I am!

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