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I agree. About time for some good news.

Here's some more information on Gnome: http://faqs.pcbsd.org/8_334_en.html

It was never able to. PC-BSD being based on FreeBSD where FreeBSD can only install on primary partitions so in turn why show extended partitions if they will only add to the confusion that might already be overwhelming a new user during the install...

This is a smart move in my opinion. Helps to streamline things.

Exactly, you can only install PC-BSD on primary partitions: http://docs.pcbsd.org/guide/chap2.3.html

Just to clear up confusion. The *BSD's create a partition for themselves that has to be a primary and then create slices inside said partition. So, you're still able to chop up your mount points, etc... inside the partition. All in all, it's a bit "cleaner", but I don't know if actually is technically better or worse then the Linux way of partitioning.

I wonder why they've never made it possible to put it in an extended partition...having to take up a whole primary partition is a bit limiting, imo.

It's reasonable in my view. All local BSD mount points (/usr, /home, /tmp, /var) go into one slice, so all together they only use up one disk 'partition'.

OTOH, if you want to separate /home, /usr and others on a Linux system you have to use up separate disk partitions. Linux must support extended partitions for practical reasons.

This only limits people who want to multi-boot more than 4 OSes on one disk. Those people will have to either buy another disk or use VMware or similar.

Exactly! BSD doesn't have to have a partition for each mount point, instead, you have one primary partition and then all your mount points become slices within.

I think the BSD way is a bit cleaner myself, but I have to admit it was confusing to me when I first encountered it.

"Exactly! BSD doesn't have to have a partition for each mount point, instead, you have one primary partition and then all your mount points become slices within."

You're right, but be careful with the terminology. What you call "partition" in DOS is called "slice" in FreeBSD. A slice can hold many paritions (This is the FreeBSD term now!) which are mounted into the root partition (or into another mountpoint).

Exempli gratia:

% mount
/dev/ad0s1a on / (ufs, local)
/dev/ad0s1d on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s1e on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s1f on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)

Here, ad0 is the first hard disk, ad0s1 is its first partition (DOS) / first slice (FreeBSD). The slice holds the Partitions a (root partition), b (swap), d (system ressources), e (var), and f (home).

Every UFS1/UFS2 capable OS that is installed on the computer, let's say on another disk ad1 or on the same disk on a second slice ad0s2, can have access to these partitions.

You are entirely correct. Thank you for the clarification.

No, first of all you create the Slice for FreeBSD (called normally Partition in other systems) And then inside of the Slice you create the "Partitions" you want.

No, first of all you create the Slice for FreeBSD (called normally Partition in other systems) And then inside of the Slice you create the "Partitions" you want.

So it's possible to have extended partitions only it's called different?

No. For one thing, FBSD only allows 8 filesystems within the primary partition it uses, whereas I think an extended partition allows something like 63.

For another, it's only possible to have one extended partition per drive afaik, whereas you can have multiple BSD partitions per drive - that is, a freebsd, an openbsd, and a netbsd partition, or two freebsd's and one netbsd, etc.

Thirdly, all OS's on the drive report a *BSD partition as either a BSD primary partition or an unknown partition, not as an extended one.

FreeBSD and NetBSD handle PC disk partitioning differently than each other.

NetBSD uses its own disklabel on all architectures that have disklike devices, and only uses the PC FDISK style partition on PCs.

I believe OpenBSD is also different, but I'm not familiar with its disk layout.

That suggests that on, say, the Amiga, you need a separate disk with a netbsd disklabel to store netbsd - but i believe this is incorrect.

However, I believe this *is* the case on architectures like vax, built for VMS, which has no concept of separate partitions on a disk. Right?

Yes. I over simplified. thanks for the clarification.

You're welcome!