Subject: Re: more partitions
To: Allen Briggs <briggs@wasabisystems.com>
From: Frederick Bruckman <fredb@immanent.net>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 02/13/2004 08:44:07
On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Allen Briggs wrote:

> You'll also need to change MAXPARTITIONS in include/disklabel.h,
> and I'm not sure what else, if anything.  But this is built into
> several userland utilities and MAKEDEV.  The MacOS installer will
> certainly not do the right thing if you choose to change this.
>
> There is actually not usually much reason to partition even
> large drives very much.  NetBSD will deal with large partitions
> well and having different partitions does not really make your
> data any safer, I think.  It might slow things down a little
> bit to have things on different partitions if you would be
> accessing different partitions at the same time.

There are other reasons besides speed. It makes it possible to set
policies for backups, quotas, and permissions. When you factor in the
fact that most drives on NetBSD/mac68k hosts have HFS partitions too,
the current maximum of six useful partitions is very limiting. I think
we should follow the lead of i386 and other ports, and do what it
takes to permit up to sixteen. At the same time, we should stop hiding
the driver partitions, to make it easier to maintain the machine
entirely from within NetBSD.

Frederick