From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Feb 7 23:14: 0 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from smtp02.primenet.com (smtp02.primenet.com [206.165.6.132]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 73C4E37B401 for ; Wed, 7 Feb 2001 23:13:43 -0800 (PST) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp02.primenet.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id AAA07514; Thu, 8 Feb 2001 00:07:43 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr08.primenet.com(206.165.6.208) via SMTP by smtp02.primenet.com, id smtpdAAArEayLo; Thu Feb 8 00:07:32 2001 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr08.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id AAA07197; Thu, 8 Feb 2001 00:13:26 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <200102080713.AAA07197@usr08.primenet.com> Subject: Re: Support for FreeBSD in an extended slice. To: mwm@mired.org (Mike Meyer) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 07:13:26 +0000 (GMT) Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <14978.16659.207713.3575@guru.mired.org> from "Mike Meyer" at Feb 08, 2001 12:47:47 AM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL2] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > People blunder by -questions fairly regularly asking what they need to > do to put FreeBSD in an extended partition. From the looks of things, > about 90% of the work to do that has been done. All that's missing is > fdisk support for extended partitions to create it, and boot > support. Anyone one to comment on how hard those two things would be? Creating the partitions and putting Berkeley disktabs on them, and newfs'ing them is trivial; probably less than a couple dozen lines of code changes. The big problem is that the BIOS and the default PC MBR can't handle booting from them. Most MBR's can't, since there is no real standard way of marking the thing active (which is the only way to tell a root partition from a data partition, among other things). If you get all that sorted out, you still have to figure out how to mount the thing as root (which is less trivial than a dozen lines of code, but quite possible -- might even result in some code cleanup that's been asking for it for a long time). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message