On Thu, Jan 06, 2022 at 01:27:25PM +0000, Stuart Henderson wrote: > On 2022/01/06 09:56, Crystal Kolipe wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 06, 2022 at 11:11:30AM -0000, Stuart Henderson wrote: > > > You can create more than one "fdisk partition" but there's not much > > > point in doing so. It doesn't give you any extra "disklabel partitions". > > > > There is a niche use case for multiple OpenBSD MBR partitions, though: > > I said "not much" rather than "no" for a reason. I didn't think it was > really helpful to go into more details of things which are possible but > inadvisable.
I agree that such a partitioning scheme isn't very useful in practice, but I think the example helps people to understand that the BSD disklabel does not live "inside" the OpenBSD MBR partition. There seems to be this kind of urban myth that the MBR partitioning scheme is treated as the "overall" disk layout and that the OpenBSD partition is then "sub-divided" into pieces which only matter to OpenBSD. Then people start making wrong assumptions, such as that the disklabel is always in the same location, that it's portable between architectures, that a disk without an OpenBSD MBR partition can't have a disklabel, and that changes to the MBR partitions will or should be reflected in the disklabel automatically.
