On Feb 13, 2004, at 8:44 AM, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

> 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.

Exposing the driver partitions may be a bit dangerous.  On the 68k Mac 
the boot ROM searches the SCSI chain for a device with a driver and 
uses that as the default SCSI driver for the system.  If you have SCSI 
devices on the system but none have a valid driver, or the one selected 
by the ROM doesn't have one, you'll get a very nasty Sad Mac.   If you 
happened to do this on your internal disk you may be forced to 
physically remove the disk to get the system to boot again.

If we're going to expose them, it might be a good idea to add some 
"expert" function that does this just to keep users from shooting 
themselves in the foot.

-bob