On Mon, 5 Oct 1998, Robert Elz wrote:

>     No. All that means is you're stuffing things the kernel does not
>     need to know about into the kernel,
> 
> Huh?   You've just said that the kernel already knows magic about the 'c'
> partition ..

Knowing a few lines of magic that is common across every NetBSD
port is somewhat different from having specialised partition-reading
magic that it is only used on one or a few ports. Of course, if
you ever want to be able to read that disk on another port, since
there's no userland utility available, you actually do need to put
that code in all ports. This brings us to the point where the Sun/3
kernel has code in it to read DOS partition tables, and more code
to read Amiga partition tables, and more yet to read whatever it
is Macs do....

> Aside from compatability with existing /dev/ entries, and labels, which is
> no small issue....

Indeed. To my mind, if we're going to make this sort of change,
changing to a system where we would still have to worry about moving
this aside so we could have one more partition is foolish. We should
start by changing to a system that gives us so many partitions that
using one for the NetBSD portion, one for the whole disk, and a
dozen others for accessing other OS's filesystems still leaves us
with more partitions than we're likely to use for our own work.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson  <cjs@portal.ca>  604-257-9400    De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.
Any opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.
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