On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 03:16:47AM +0700, Robert Elz wrote:
> [...]
> This may seem weird, but can't the NetBSD label just go in some
> other block?   There must be some blocks on the drive that NetBSD
> can write in, or no-one would want a NetBSD label there in the
> first place.
> 
> I understand the attraction of having the kernel write labels, rather
> that user code, but I'm not sure how that's supposed to work when
> drives are moved from system to system - different architectures, and
> we really want NetBSD to be able to find, use, and update, the drive
> contents, regardless of which system the drive is currently connected to.

I think this should be the job for a userland tool (a la mbrlabel(8)).
The kernel needs to know about native partitions maps for the port, to be
able to find the root partition, but we probably don't want to put the
knowledge of each partition map of the world in the kernel.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 23 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--