(thanks for changing the Subject line!)

[  I plugged a new disk into NeXTSTEP 3.3 and it newfs'ed it and set it up as a
[  512 byte/sector disk.  It did not do a low level format.
...
[  The interesting thing is that to the OS (NeXTSTEP), it believed that
[  they were 1024 byte sectors.  In particular /etc/disktab says that the
[  only sector size supported is 1024 bytes (DEV_BSIZE).  Also, the
[  disklabel shows that it's just like NetBSD:  fsize is 1024 and bsize is
[  8192.
...
[  Still 512 bytes/sector.
...
[  My vaguely educated guess is that they just hid that layer of
[  complexity and called the "sector" size of the disk 1024 bytes.

Yeah.  The device has 512 byte blocks, and the filesystem has 1024 byte  
"sectors."  As "der Mouse" pointed out, most NetBSD FFS filesystems are 1k/8k.

I've lost track of whether there was actually a problem experienced by anyone,  
or merely a perceived problem.  From the newfs point of view (admittedly  
rather high-level), a disk with a filesystem initialized on a NeXT should be  
compatible with other BFFS filesystems.  Are there any differences?  Is there  
any documentation of the differences?

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting