Nutchanon Wetchasit <[email protected]> writes: > I see, so NetBSD disklabel was not about sub-partition of a MBR slice; > but rather being a complete "shadow partition table" that could only > be seen under NetBSD... in the same manner that GPT was being > a shadow partition table in a MBR-GPT hybrid disk-- which could be seen > only under GPT-supporting OS, and must be manually kept in sync...
Maybe it's ended up like that, but the real story is that long ago, when there wasn't any MS Windows, Unix systems (I'm 99% sure Sixth and Seventh edition, 1976, 1978ish) had disklabels. The 1st-stage bootloader loaded the first disk block and ran it. Maybe that 1st stage was in ROM, maybe you toggled it in with switches. The disklabel was the partition table, which was a concept of UNIX, and there was no concept of partitioning disks in a general manner that applied to all operating systems. On IBM PCs, the MBR partition table was used by DOS/Windows, and it came to be that it was read and evaluated by other operating systems as a co-existence strategy. But NetBSD ran on many system types, and i386 (PCs) was just one of them. disklabel was the native method. Ends up in the same place, but the I think the historical perspective is useful.
