From owner-freebsd-current Thu Mar 8 9:31:10 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mail.wgate.com (mail.wgate.com [38.219.83.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 676D637B718 for ; Thu, 8 Mar 2001 09:31:05 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from rjesup@wgate.com) Received: from jesup.eng.tvol.net ([10.32.2.26]) by mail.wgate.com with SMTP (Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service Version 5.5.2653.13) id GN5Y4AJ8; Thu, 8 Mar 2001 12:31:10 -0500 Reply-To: Randell Jesup To: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: well! That root didn't work! Let's try another! From: Randell Jesup Date: 08 Mar 2001 12:31:10 -0500 In-Reply-To: Matthew Jacob's message of "Sun, 4 Mar 2001 13:13:36 -0800 (PST)" Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) Emacs/20.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Matthew Jacob 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message