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Date: Thu, 24 Apr 1997 18:50:17 +1000 (EST)
From: Stephen McKay <syssgm@dtir.qld.gov.au>
Message-Id: <199704240850.SAA21238@ogre.dtir.qld.gov.au>
To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
cc: syssgm@dtir.qld.gov.au
Subject: Re: disklabel -- owner?
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Warner Losh <imp@village.org> wrote:

>In message <199704211655.JAA13746@phaeton.artisoft.com> Terry Lambert writes:
>: NetBSD has upped this to 16 (or was it OpenBSD).
>
>OpenBSD defintitely did it.  I don't think that NetBSD has done
>anything about this.
>
>OpenBSD can grok, btw the old style disklabels that FreeBSD writes.
>
>: Either way, it's possible to up the number... but is it desirable?
>
>Yes.  I think so.  Not enought to try to do the work, however.

By my calculations there is room for 22 partition entries, plus spare change.
So, it's easy to fit 16 entries in the label.  Make a new magic number to
distinguish it from the old one, and voila!  Pick the same magic number as
OpenBSD to set new heights of logic and cooperation.

Not much code needs to know about the two types of disk labels.  Oh, and
the dkmakeminor() macro (and friends) will have to steal a bit from the
unit number to give to the partition number.

Sounds too easy to not do. :-)  Anybody got OpenBSD's new disklabel.h?

>: how big the BSD partition is.  So 'c' and 'd' are redundant (all
>: redundancy not related to fault tolerance should be eliminated).
>
>I think that 'd' is no longer used, on freeBSD, for this purpose.  It
>doesn't show up at all in any of my disklabel edits that I've been
>doing lately.

Yep, 'd' is dead (and not missed).  'c' is a bit of a left-over since the
slice code went in, but it's Traditional.  Lots of code knows this. :-)
Though, with a bit of effort we could get rid of its special purpose.

Stephen.

PS  Warner, I have an interest in replacing fdisk (and perhaps disklabel)
with something better, but will keep them strictly command line driven.
Other folks can put a GUI on top if they like that sort of thing.