From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Sep 27 11:49:24 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from c2-dbn-5.dial-up.net (c2-dbn-5.dial-up.net [196.34.155.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 312FF37B423; Wed, 27 Sep 2000 11:49:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from rnordier@localhost) by c2-dbn-5.dial-up.net (8.8.7/8.6.12) id UAA20084; Wed, 27 Sep 2000 20:48:17 +0200 (SAST) From: Robert Nordier Message-Id: <200009271848.UAA20084@c2-dbn-5.dial-up.net> Subject: Re: putting FreeBSD in an extended partition In-Reply-To: "from Zhiui Zhang at Sep 27, 2000 10:36:52 am" To: Zhiui Zhang Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 20:48:14 +0200 (SAST) Cc: Mike Smith , Doug White , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL82 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Zhiui Zhang wrote: > On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, Mike Smith wrote: > > If that were possible, it would be trivial to improve the loader to deal > > with that case. The kernel most certainly can mount an extended partition > > as root, however. > > I know this is a minor subject. But Why Linux can be put in an extended > partition while FreeBSD cannot? I can not find anywhere (e.g. > kern/subr_diskslice.c) in the kernel that prevents this and I know LILO > can boot FreeBSD. If it is the problem of booteasy, then we can use other > boot loader. The standard bootblocks (ie. boot2) don't support this at present, nor do our tools like fdisk(8) and the equivalent part of sysinstall; so there's a reasonable amount of work needed to make booting from extended partitions a properly-supported feature. I'll most likely be adding this support in the next few months, though. It hasn't been a priority item as there's been little interest till recently. It should be fairly easy to hack boot2 to get this working in your particular case, if you have the time and inclination. -- Robert Nordier rnordier@nordier.com rnordier@FreeBSD.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message