From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jun 26 10:34:10 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id KAA23947 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 26 Jun 1995 10:34:10 -0700 Received: from freebsd.netcraft.co.uk (lambda.demon.co.uk [158.152.17.124]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA23935 for ; Mon, 26 Jun 1995 10:34:03 -0700 Received: (from paul@localhost) by freebsd.netcraft.co.uk (8.6.11/8.6.9) id SAA00977 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Mon, 26 Jun 1995 18:34:09 +0100 From: Paul Richards Message-Id: <199506261734.SAA00977@freebsd.netcraft.co.uk> Subject: Re: Announcing 2.0.5-950622-SNAP To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 18:34:08 +0100 (BST) In-Reply-To: <199506260636.IAA21974@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at Jun 26, 95 08:36:21 am Reply-to: paul@freebsd.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Length: 1370 Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk In reply to J Wunsch who said > > As Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > > > > I'm curious why dual boot is a "no and possibly never"? > > > Just the amount of work involved is all. You can't have 2 FreeBSD > > slices on a disk and boot from the second one as the boot code is too > > stupid to understand that you might want to boot from something other > > than the first one it finds. > > Except for the space constraints, it should be possible to extent the > boot syntax from: > > driver(unit,part)/filename > > to > > driver(unit,[slice,]part)/filename I don't understand the problem? You just boot the partition that has the active flag set. Our boot process doesn't do this properly but it's not conceptually difficult. Last time I looked it wasn't the bootblocks that were the problem but the disk drivers, since they built fake disklabels by searching for the first FreeBSD partition. I haven't looked at that area of the code since diskslices came online so I'm not sure what happens now. It's simple enough to change the bootblocks to do the above and set the active flag for that partition, as long as the kernel then does the right thing there's not a problem. -- Paul Richards, Bluebird Computer Systems. FreeBSD core team member. Internet: paul@FreeBSD.org, http://www.freebsd.org/~paul Phone: 0370 462071 (Mobile), +44 1222 457651 (home)