Modern FreeBSD Installer?

[cpghost]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 12:50:46AM -0700, Michael David Crawford wrote:
> The partitioner will allow you to create more partitions than the 
> FreeBSD partition table will allow.  Rather than giving it the name of a 
> special file in the /dev/directory, it will name it just "X".  You can 
> create as many partitions named "X" as you like.
> 
> Then the newfs will fail.
> 
> I experienced this the other day, and have been meaning to file a bug 
> report about it.

Yes, this is a long standing problem. On one or both of {Open,Net}BSD,
the number of possible partitions per slice is higher. I'd really wish
FreeBSD's bsdlabel(8) would allow for more partitions. The problem
here is not with sysinstall though. From bsdlabel(8):

     The partition table can have up to 8 entries.  It contains the following
     information:

     #       The partition identifier is a single letter in the range `a' to
             `h'.  By convention, partition `c' is reserved to describe the
             entire disk.

Take away 'b' for swap, and 'c' for the whole disk, you can only
use 6 partitions per slice (including the root partition) on the
bootable slice. That's clearly not enough, esp. on big disks, and
with complex setups. :-(

> Mike
> -- 
> Michael David Crawford
> mdc at prgmr.com

-cpghost.

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