On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Bob Nestor wrote:

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

I think, rather, it must not have an invalid driver. There's not a
problem booting with a freshly formatted drive attached.

> 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.

How would that work? If the kernel puts them in the label, then
they're going to be available as device nodes.

If you do have a reason to update a disk driver or hypothetical
"NetBSD Boot"  partition, say, the only way to do it currently is to
calculate values to use with "dd" on the whole device. This is, IMO,
more dangerous than accessing a partition directly.

Besides, "pdisk" has been exposing all the partitions for some time
now, and no one's reported a problem with that.

Frederick