Re: turning off COMPAT_386BSD_MBRPART in disklabel

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 05:07:51AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> 
> Are *our* ancient disklabels partition-relative? It's so long ago that
> I'm not sure... but the code in currently in disklabel(8) doesn't appear
> to know anything at all about partition-relative labels.

They are not.  This was a major point of divergence between FreeBSD and
NetBSD.

> Given the rest of the discussion here, the fact that fixing
> disklabel(8) properly isn't completely trivial, and tls's recent
> experience, I think the feature should just be turned off in
> disklabel... but, just in case, not removed entirely until we branch
> netbsd-6.

For the record, I am pretty sure it was sysinst, not disklabel, which
hosed my disk.  Sysinst compiles equivalent code in directly, no?

As it stands now, installing NetBSD on a disk that has previously had
FreeBSD installed in the physically-first MBR partition will destroy
that FreeBSD installation.  Not good.

Thor