NetBSD and OpenBSD label geoms.

[Loren M. Lang]

I have a quad-boot system with Gentoo Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and
NetBSD.  I was disappointed to see that none of the BSD's can see each
other.  (Linux could read at least 2 if not all of them.)  So, I'd like
to rectify that by making FreeBSD be able to read the NetBSD disklabel
and then OpenBSD's disklabel.  I'm thinking it will be easiest to copy
the FreeBSD disklabel geom and modify it to work with NetBSD, and then
merge it back into the FreeBSD disklabel code if it's still very
similar.  I've been looking through the disklabel data structure for
both NetBSD and FreeBSD and they still seem to be very similar, in fact,
maybe even identical for the typical usage.  The main differnce is that
netbsd seems to have replaced some of the variables with unions that
include the original variable in the union.  The unions are not any
bigger than the original variable, and the other entries in the union
seem to be for other purposes like a different filesystem than FFS.
This make be believe that the only real difference between the two OSes
is how the fields are interpreted.  The next step I think would be for
me to write a program that reads /dev/adXSY and prints out the fields so
I can compare the two and see how they differ.  I'd be interested to
hear any thoughts others might have on this issue.

Also, has there been any work on something like this before that may be
useful?

-- 
I sense much NT in you.
NT leads to Bluescreen.
Bluescreen leads to downtime.
Downtime leads to suffering.
NT is the path to the darkside.
Powerful Unix is.

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