Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 23:36:59 +0200 (MEST) From: Toerless Eckert <eckert@i4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> To: jhb@FreeBSD.org (John Baldwin) Cc: eckert@i4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de Subject: Re: boot2 broken ? (booting from pst fails) Message-ID: <200304142136.XAA28381@faui40p.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.20030414162259.jhb@FreeBSD.org> from John Baldwin at "Apr 14, 2003 4:22:59 pm"
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> As you pointed out, FreeBSD does try to avoid dirty hacks like this for the > sake of a cleaner and more flexible design. But you can't have it without affecting compatiblity. > Hardcoding the sectors would make > things like booting kernels directly from boot2 as well as booting > /boot/loader.old in the case that /boot/loader breaks impossible. If booting loader.old is so important, why not boot2.old ? It's no different. At some point there is something hardcoded. I don't see the big issue here in hardcoding the loader sectors instead of effetively the boot2 sectors. Heck, one could even hardcode sectors of both loader and loader.old for the choice. Sure, it would be nice to not depend on this. I for once think it's perfectly valid to spare a full freebsd partition just for the linear encoding of the bootstrap code, but that's just me. > Also, apart > from your hardware, FreeBSD is quite compatible with the large majority of > PC hardware. We boot directly off of 3ware ATA RAID controllers where I > work, so I really think your claims are rather overstated. Don't forget that neither 3ware nor promise list FreeBSD as a supported operating system, both are equally listed in FreeBSDs hardware list, there's no indication that booting for one of them doesn't work but that it's supposed to work on the other. Neither does the documentation of boot2 or loader explain the possible issue so as to buy possible buyers. It would really be nice if this boot-compatiblity/incompatiblity information would be documented somehwere. Like in pst(4) and boot(8). Cheers Toerless
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