Date: 08 Mar 2001 12:31:10 -0500 From: Randell Jesup <rjesup@wgate.com> To: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: well! That root didn't work! Let's try another! Message-ID: <ybuhf14qiap.fsf@jesup.eng.tvol.net.jesup.eng.tvol.net> In-Reply-To: Matthew Jacob's message of "Sun, 4 Mar 2001 13:13:36 -0800 (PST)"
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Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com> writes:
>> > My FreeBSD-alpha PC164 lost it's IDE disk for 4.2 somehow- which I'd
>> > just loaded the 4.2 kernel from- so it decided to run off of da0
>> > instead, which was -current. Truly a startling turn of
>> > events. Shouldn't one stop and ask if the root one asked for isn't
>> > available?
>>
>> There are two schools of thought here. One says "you should try very
>> hard to find a root device", the other says "you should boot only from
>> the exactly correct root device and complain otherwise". I took the
>> first approach because its advocates shouted more loudly than those of
>> the second.
>> Would a louder warning message be enough of a compromised?
>
>Actually, no. I think very strongly that you shouldn't always look that hard
>automatically- you should look hard to find reasonable choices (you could say,
>da2, 7 and 9 have what *appear* to be filesystems I can use)- but you
>shouldn't just launch onto them- vital customer data corruption can result.
As suggested, if the correct root device can't be found, the boot
_should_ offer you a choice of running off others that appear to be
bootable. Also, I certainly can see instances where someone would want to
have it take an alternate partition to run off of - it could be an
alternate boot behavior programmed into the boot block code at label time.
Note: I don't know exactly what we do now; I'm just taking the above
comments as fact.
--
Randell Jesup, Worldgate Communications, ex-Scala, ex-Amiga OS team ('88-94)
rjesup@wgate.com
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