On Jun 7, 2007, at 8:41 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> I take it that this means you intend to switch them over to use  
> GPTs. So
> we'll "create" a format there, which I guess was designed for another
> type of systems...

We don't be "creating" a format anywhere.  We'll be using a de facto  
standard format - GPT.  GPT was not designed for any type of system in  
particular.  It's completely general.

Using your logic, we "created" a format on x86 PCs by using BSD  
disklabels there (their original usage was on VAX and Tahoe systems,  
and some of the fields in the label reflect that heritage ... does  
that mean BSD disklabels were "designed for" those types of systems  
and thus shouldn't be used elsewhere?)


> Oh well, as long as it keeps as non-intrusive as
> possible. BSD disklabels are rather nice, since they are rather  
> simple,
> and the design makes a lot of sense, when you don't have to mix in the
> IBM PC MBR stuff, or other similar schemes.
> The design on a PC, with the d-partition has never felt good to  
> me. :-)
> But I'm onld enough to remember the time when the partition layout was
> hardcoded in the driver.

You're falling into the trap of confusing the on-disk representation  
with the in-memory representation.  This is what wedges is designed to  
get around.

Just so everyone is clear -- wedges is what NetBSD is adopting (albeit  
slowly) for the in-memory representation and user presentation of disk  
partitions.  They will be used for all on-disk partition table formats.

And, FWIW, GPT partition tables are really no more complicated than  
BSD disklabel partition tables.  the

>
>
> 	Johnny
>

-- thorpej