In some mail I received from ronald@demon.net, sie wrote
> 
> [ access non-bsd partitions from bsd ]
> 
> > > > Might I suggest that
> > > > this is is one of those things that would be real nice to see changed so
> > > > you don't need to mess around (on PC's)...
> > > 
> > > Thats on the "To Do" list, yes. Help is of course solicited in
> > > implementation!
> > 
> > Well, I'm not at all familiar with that part of the kernel
> 
> What's being proposed here ?  I see two possible options for this:
> 
> a) Teach the kernel to understand the FDISK partitions and make them
>    available under a different set of minor numbers
> 
> b) Write a userland program that parses FDISK partitions and generates
>    BSD partition records out of them (and probably vice versa :-)
> 
> Only (a) requires kernel familiarity, but I would hope the netbsd
> community to oppose this one strongly on the grounds of not
> bloating the kernel where userland work would do as well.

No, a userland program will not work as well.  Even if we have 16*
partitions allowed, I'll show you how that becomes next to useless:

wd0: dos primary
wd0: extended dos: 2 * dos logical drives
wd0: ffs (bsd): /, swap, /var, /usr, /usr/local, /usr/src
wd0: ufs (svr4): /, swap, /var, /usr, /opt,

(yes, I have a HD at home which looks something like that)

both ufs & ffs will support upto 8 logical partitions within the
physical partition.  If I use some user program to translate that to
a disklabel, I'm upto 16 already.  If I have anything else on that
disk I want to access, I'm stuffed!

Linux tries to use number partitions as it detects them at bootup. This
is incredibly bogus and isn't worth thinking about.

Solaris-x86 & FreeBSD drivers understand fdisk partitions.  (NT looses
and doesn't know anything that isn't DOS based :)

Darren
* - the increase to 16 logical partitions is only a recent addition(?)
to NetBSD - and I don't know for sure - unless I'm confused with FreeBSD.