If you think disklabels are a great feature, I recommend using them
(I personally find them terrible, but that's a different story).
Linux 2.0 supports disklabels; all you have to do is to enable the
experimental features, enable the ufs driver, and enable bsd style
disklabels. Be aware that there are as many styles of disklabels as
there are BSD versions, and that especially Sun uses a different one
than 4.4BSD. What you get with BSD style disklabels interworks with
FreeBSD and the Hurd on my system.
Be prepared that all minor device numbers change on the disk, because
Linux counts those 'partitions in a slice' (BSD speak) just as
'logical drives' (MS speak). So the first of them is sda5, and so on
possibly preceded or followed by other disklabelled primary partitions
or logical drives on extended partitions.
Unless you already run BSD, you also need to be able to create a
disklabel on a partition. I believe the latest fdisk is capable of doing
this.
Regards,
Martin