disklabels and slices

[R Joseph Wright <rjoseph@mammalia.org>]

I've been going over all the FAQs and documents that I can find regarding
the Hurd, and have found that Hurd uses a BSD style disklabel.  I love this
feature, but I want to know how to use it.  
For example, under FreeBSD, you can create a slice (dos partition) and then 
within it you can divide it further into 8 BSD partitions and the disk would 
then be ad0s1a for the first BSD partition on the first slice on the first 
IDE disk, ad1s2b for the second BSD partition on the second slice of the second
IDE disk, etc.  No juggling filesystems around like with Linux.  
For the Hurd, I have seen mention that it uses disklabels but I haven't seen 
anything on how to create this style of partition.  
And, does the 1GB limit refer to the size of the slice or the partition
within the slice?

Joseph