wedges and gpt.

[Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl%beer.org@localhost>]

I just spent the last week trying to install NetBSD-5.0.1 on a Mac  
Mini w/coreduo.  I found this Wiki page:

http://wiki.netbsd.se/How_to_install_NetBSD_on_an_Apple_Macbook_w/core2duo

....extremely helpful and in the process updated it a bit ...  
Obviously that wiki page is not an official resource but one  
observation I did make was the our GPT support and support for Wedges  
is very sparsely documented...  I ended up having to burn the machine  
down completely and start from scratch twice just to get it working  
right, and update the Wiki in the process...

I'm rather surprised this has been a work in progress since 2004 and  
today, in almost-2010, Sysinst still has no idea what a dk-anything  
is...

I don't know how much of this is Mac/EFI specific or how much is the  
nature of our beast...

(1) the 'gpt' command tells you what to type to dynamically create a  
wedge but the command it spews is not syntactically correct.
(2) Unfortunately, even if you do convert it, syntactically, it still  
won't let you newfs; and really requires a reboot so the kernel can  
probe the partitions and create its own dk's.
(3) Do we really need a GPT partition table, then wedges, then an MBR  
partition table, and then subsequently a BSD disk label?  This onion  
has a lot of layers.
(4) Even once I did get it all working properly, gpt still reports  
"gpt: rwd0d: Suspicious MBR at Sector 0" and I never did figure out  
how to make that go away while leaving a functional system.

As is probably clear by now, I still don't really understand how this  
is all put together and how I managed to get it to finally work in the  
end... I should really send-pr and I feel irresponsible for not  
actually doing so; but this took longer than anticipated and I've had  
to take the machine out to the colo facility and don't have any more  
Mac hardware I can tear down and re-re-rebuild to produce transcripts  
and such for send-pr...  So this message is an appeal to those who  
understand this stuff to try to direct a little more energy into  
finishing it, because really, it's fairly cool..