On Thu, Dec 28, 2000 at 06:26:15PM -0800, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Dec 2000, Chuck Silvers wrote:
> 
> > 64 partitions has the additional issue that the current on-disk
> > bsd disklabel format doesn't allow for that many entries,
> > so we would have to create yet another on-disk format to store
> > that many partitions.  the current bsd label layout is constrained
> > to one 512-byte sector on many platforms because of the placement of
> > the bsd label at sector 0 and the placement of the boot blocks
> > right after that.
> 
> True, but the bsd disklabel format isn't the only disk partitioning format
> we can read. Both Apple partitioning and MBR partitioning can get us to
> beyond 32 partitions quick. :-)

since the proposal was to change the bsd label format, I thought the idea
was to allow use of bsd labels for the additional partitions.  but since
the bsd disk format is also the in-core format, changing it would allow
other label formats to use more partitions in-core as you say.

at any rate, it would be pretty strange if the preferred label format
for netbsd (which is currently the bsd label format) didn't support the
maximum number of partitions supported by netbsd, and the bsd label
can't support even 32 reasonably on all platforms.

-Chuck