| The existence of official i386 port is actually what made me come | straight here to NetBSD; without even thinking about "distro-hopping" | to test the water with any other flavors of BSD Unices. It is still used, and there are systems still being made that have only 32 bit processors I believe. Not generally intended to be workstations or the equivalent though.
i'll chime in, for the record, that i regularly use NetBSD/i386 on actual 486 and pentium systems for workstation use (as well as non-workstation, mostly routers connecting said machines). but my standards are relatively low and i am quite happy for them to behave as though it's still the 90s.
| Is there any official documentation about what the exact process/rules | that i386 port use in enumerating the MBR [primary/logical] slices | into that made-up in-memory NetBSD disklabel? Sorry, I can't answer that - nothing I am aware of, but that doesn't mean there is nothing.
see the very bottom of the DESCRIPTION section from the manpage for disklabel(8), relevant paragraph quoted here:
"On systems that expect to have disks with MBR partitions (see fdisk(8)) disklabel will find, and update if requested, labels in the first 8k of type 169 (NetBSD) MBR labels and within the first 8k of the physical disk. On other systems disklabel will only look at the start of the disk. The offset at which the labels are written is also system dependent."
given that this is the location that command stores the information, i'd also expect you to find that this is where the kernel looks for it.
the manpage for mbrlabel(8) may also be of interest.
