On Wed, 8 Jul 1998, Dr. Bill Studenmund wrote:

> On Wed, 8 Jul 1998, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> 
> > Why can't we have a disklabel in the NetBSD partition, the way the i386
> > port does? That system is very flexible. You can craft partitions outside
> > of the NetBSD partition, if you like, and it still coughs up a
> > pseudo-label if there is no real one. In the past, we haven't seemed to
> > need it as much as they do. DOS-like systems are limited to four
> > "physical" partitions, but we can have (seven or) eight. That's more than
> > enough for say, a 1G disk, but it starts to be restrictive with larger
> > drives.
> 
> What I'd think is cool is we just add a seperate MacOS partition which has
> the disk label. It doesn't need to show up in the NetBSD disklabel, so we
> don't need to loose a letter, and we can save it.

Yes, that might work. Not losing a letter is the whole point. There's no
requirement that the disklabel cover the whole disk--you just omit any
partition that you don't expect to mount, be it a driver, partition map,
NetBSD disklabel, or MacOS partition. Another cool thing about the i386
disklabel is that you can edit and "enable" it without rebooting. You
could have a spare letter or two, and switch that to a different part of
the disk on the fly. New style disklabels can have comment lines. The
biggest problem I can see is that people could possibly be confused by all
the possibilities.