On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Neil Ludban wrote:

> Are there any more general plans for NetBSD's handling of disk
> partitions?  Your direction is good for power users of Apple stuff,
> but may cause frustration for us lesser users from other OS vendors
> or architectures:

Note: this proposal was specifically for users of Apple Partition Maps.
:-)

> Before installing NetBSD, I'd like the option to use the native OS
> and its tools to repartition the drive and reserve some space "for
> NetBSD".

sysinst will do this for you, and I've done it before. :-)

> The installation program should be able to find/allocate the BIOS
> partition entry (or, create a minimal BIOS partition table when no
> other OS is installed or wanted).  For new users, the install
> program needs to supply appropriate NetBSD partition sizes and file
> system types/flags.  A consistent machine-independent view of the
> NetBSD partitions would make it easier for an administrator who is
> familiar with NetBSD to install on a new architecture.

Note: you're talking about BIOS partition tables. You're talking about
i386 or a few of the hpc platforms. A good number of machines don't
have/use MBR partition tables, so what you describe won't apply. :-(

> After install, the NetBSD fstab (at least for NetBSD partitions)
> should remain unchanged when other operating systems have made
> modifications to the BIOS partition table.
>
> As an example, FreeBSD/i386 has 3 device layers: wd0 for the whole
> disk, wd0s[1-4] for "slices" (BIOS partitions) and wd0s1[a-h] for
> disklabel partitions.  Partitions from other OSs map consistently
> into this scheme, instead of automagically showing up somewhere
> in the disklabel.

We have thoughts on what to do about slices & such, but they are
different. The FreeBSD method doesn't scale well to non-MBR systems, and I
also don't see how well it scales for extended partition maps.

Take care,

Bill