RFC: Enhance GEOM to mount NetBSD partitions

[Jens Schweikhardt]

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"?

Regards,

	Jens
-- 
Jens Schweikhardt http://www.schweikhardt.net/
SIGSIG -- signature too long (core dumped)