RFC: Enhance GEOM to mount NetBSD partitions

[Eric Anderson]

Jens Schweikhardt wrote:
> hello, world\n
> 
> it appears FreeBSD is only able to mount a very limited set of partitions
> in a slice with sysid = 169 (NetBSD). To be precise, FreeBSD can only mount
> the a: partition of such a slice, because it's the only partition for which
> an entry in /dev exists, e.g. I can "mount /dev/ad0s1 /dev". This provides
> access to the NetBSD root partition (wd0a in NetBSD lingo). Other partitions
> within that slice, e.g. /home on what NetBSD calls wd0e are inaccessible.
> 
> We all know NetBSD has a different (and shall we say counterintuitive)
> philosophy regarding disklabels and partition numbering. I find it
> slightly ashaming that we can't even mount our brother BSD's UFS1 and
> UFS2 in general at least on architectures using the canonical MBR format.
> 
> Is anyone here who has more than two out of {time, interest, ability} to
> implement a geom provider (is that the correct terminus technicus?) for
> FreeBSD allowing to mount all partitions in a slice with sysid = 169
> (NetBSD)? The difference of a NetBSD disklabel appears to be the number
> of partitions (16 instead of 8) and the semantics of the c: ("complete
> slice") and d: ("complete disk") entries on i386.
> 
> If you guys are swamped with other interesting projects, would anyone
> be willing to be a mentor for the upcoming Google "Summer of Code"?


The best help I can give you, is to point you to this thread:

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=479157+0+archive/2006/freebsd-current/20060319.freebsd-current


Eric



-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
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