That is a rewriting of history. The disklabel format predates the PC.
It came from the the ancient attempt to handle things in CSRG's 4.3reno/4.4 work on the hp300. It was probably a rewrite of the native HPUX disk format. This was then put on all the other architectures, as a unified view of the disk. It was modified and extended on as as-needed basis. Rewriting the history like this is pathetic inaccurate and narrowminded. Your history is absolutely false and you've made up a bunch of balony. It is not true, and even a elementary review of the history of disklabel.h back into the early NetBSD tree will make it clear what's going on. OH, and I did most of the early work post-CSRG, because we needed to "emulate" this on SunOS, and I ported Torek's sparc code into NetBSD. I urge you to stop posting such balony. <zeurk...@volny.cz> wrote: > "Groot" <differentialr...@disr.it> wrote: > > I've tried and failed to create more than 16 > > partitions on OpenBSD. First of all I don't > > understand the difference between the operations > > performed by fdisk and disklabel. Is it that > > OpenBSD sees partitions differently? First we > > create an OpenBSD partition with fdisk and then > > with disklabel we can create at the most 16 more > > filesystem partitions within it. > > Traditionally, BSD has used only its own disklabel(5). Unfortunately, > mess-dos on the IBM pee-cee set a competing standard, the "Master Boot > Record", with a separate partition table (and a lot of kludging to > support more than 4 partitions). While it was (and AFAIK remains) > possible to use the whole disk the traditional way (only a BSD > disklabel, as on e.g. sparc64), it has become common practice to wrap > the BSD stuff in a mess-dos partition, with the caveat that some of the > mess-dos partition entries are duplicated in the BSD label. > > Thus, the BSD label is essentially OpenBSD's version of the structure of > things on the disk. But is an imperfect version: 16 partitions *is* the > limit for an OpenBSD label, and, of course, mess-dos partition > identifiers (which are more *ahem* fine-grained) are not used. To top it > off, partitions which rest within the mess-dos OpenBSD partition are not > necessarily represented on the mess-dos level (this would count, from > the mess-dos perspective, as overlap between partitions and thus confuse > a great many tools). > > Then GPT entered the story to make the mess complete. But me'll remain > blissfully unaware of the inner workings of that particular clusterfsck, > if you don't mind ;) > > It's no shame to be confused by this garbage. Almost all of us'd like > better, but for the above hysterical raisins, it's not so easy to make > it so. > > --zeurkous. > > -- > Friggin' Machines! >
