> them to to be used as system disks without requiring a BIOS update.
>
> I suspect that the only reason that the BSD systems don't support
> sector sizes other than 512 is a lack of test media.

this is not true. older SCSI drives allow formatting with 1K sectors,
CDROM's are 2K and EMULATED usually as 512b by netbsd, magneto-opticals
are up to 4KB (and doesn't work in NetBSD because of that).

> Indeed someone has recently gone through the netbsd code getting
> it to work with (IIRC) 1k blocks for a specific disk.
>
> With a test sample the ffs support would be fixed in a few days,
> and probably backported to recent releases within a few weeks.
>
> No one using windows will care :-) you could lock the ATA bus
exactly