Multi-partitioning Lemote boxen

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%mylinuxisp.com@localhost>]

I've started poking at my Lemote YeeLoong's disk (or rather a scratch
disk of the same capacity plugged into USB (not an SD card)) to see how
to divide things up to provide NetBSD with its own independent set of
partitions while still allowing OpenBSD and penguin-OS to share.

I was initially confused because my only other experience with machines
supported by an "evb*" port is evbarm--BEAGLEBONE in particular.  The
"evbarm" port seems to respect the u-boot MBR in sector 0 and put the
NetBSD disklabel in sector 1 without needing a NetBSD type 169 MBR
partition at all.

The evbmips port, on the other hand, will try to put the disklabel in
sector 0 of the disk if a NetBSD type 169 MBR partition is not defined,
and put it at the beginning of the NetBSD partition if one is defined.

Before I tried it and figured that out, I managed to create a combined
disklabel/MBR in sector 0 with some back and forth using 'fdisk',
'mbrlabel', and 'disklabel -mi' that satisfied all of PMON, penguin-OS,
and NetBSD.

While I was still using my chimera MBR/disklabel, everything seemed to
work just fine--although a stock LOONGSON kernel still blindly assumes
that the machine booted from the internal "wd0" disk and must ask for
the root device.

When I switched to using the NetBSD MBR partition, everything seemed to
go well for partitioning and 'newfs', but extracting the sets to the
FFS partitions either hangs the machine hard or stalls until no further
progress is made ('progress' shows "comp.tgz" sitting at 2% complete,
0.28 KiB/s --stalled--, indefinitely).

Now that I think about it, while using the chimera disklabel/MBR I did
not have an SD card in the card reader, but when I switched to using
the NetBSD MBR partition, I had an SD card in the reader.  Since it's
USB-attached, it may be interacting adversely with the USB-SATA disk
adapter.

Also, I'm using 7.99.47 at this time.  I will update to 7.99.51 soon.

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