Date: Sun, 13 Aug 1995 18:21:39 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: achar@topic.mv.us.adobe.com (Alan Char) Cc: questions@freebsd.org, support@cdrom.com Subject: Re: Free BSD problems and questions Message-ID: <199508130851.SAA18352@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <9508111201.ZM1700@topic> from "Alan Char" at Aug 11, 95 12:01:45 pm
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Alan Char stands accused of saying: > Pentium with an Intel Zappa board, with I believe > the Triton chip set (I'll have to check the pci > driver messages again.) I can't help you with the major problem; I'm sure one or more of the motherboard experts will... > Smaller issues, in no particular order: > > When I installed Free BSD, I asked it to install BootEasy, but > apparently it installed it on the second disk, since when I boot, > it still boots DOS. To boot Free BSD, I have to insert the > Free BSD boot floppy and type sd(1,a)/kernel. In this light, > I have these questions: > > Can I install BootEasy on my DOS disk, and will > it work if I do? In particular, I'm wondering if > it will it work with Windows 95, who seems to be > doing weird boot things. Yes, you can install it on the first disk. I've read reports that it works OK with Win95, but I can't speak from firsthand experience. > Is there a way I can change the default device on > the boot floppy? I wouldn't mind having to stick in > the floppy to boot Free BSD, but it's a pain to have > to sit there while it's booting so I can type the > name of the device. BootEasy is a better way to go. If your root filesystem is on sd1, you're going to have to rebuild the bootblocks anyway. Look in /usr/src/sys/i386/boot/biosboot/boot.c, then say 'make intstall' there, and rewrite the boot record with 'disklabel -B sd1' > Also, is there a way to have a default kernel name > so that I can only type the device, without having > to add the /kernel? This seems to be standard > practice on this flavor of UNIX booters, I'm surprised > it's not already built in. For that matter, it would > nice if there were default partition numbers, so that > I could just say sd(1). Again, this seems to be > standard on most UNIX booters. The problem with adding features to the bootloader is size; in some situations, there just isn't room for any more features. Work is apparently underway for an extra bootstrap phase to deal with this problem. > When I booted off floppy, it says to boot using > hd(1,a)/kernel if sd and wd are both installed, or > something like that. Not knowing what it was talking > about, I tried that, and it started to boot Free BSD, > but after going through all the drivers, it wanted to > change root to /dev/sd0a instead of /dev/sd1a, so it > failed. I figured out later that I could boot by > saying sd(1,a)/kernel, but was this earlier problem > a bug or a feature? Maybe the message should change > to be more informative, or less misleading? 'wd' are IDE disks; the message is there to inform about the technique that deals with the non-correspondence between SCSI minor numbers and BIOS disk numbers when booting a SCSI disk in that situation. > When I boot, it says that the PCI driver is using 8 megabutes of > memory! Is this real memory? That seems excessive, even if I do > have 32 Mbytes of memory. I believe that means that 8M of address space is mapped to the PCI bus, not that the driver is using 8M of core. > I was thinking that maybe I could work around this problem by having > the virtual console run in vt220 mode. Do you think this would help? > Is it true that I need to rebuild the kernel to do this? Also, I > wouldn't mind if the consoles had more lines, since I have a fairly > large screen. I've seen documentation that this is possible onthe > pcvt man page, but no explanation really on how. Kernel rebuild? Read the top of /etc/sysconfig with regard to loading fonts, and the manpage for vidcontrol with regard to changing screen size. Note that you can't change to a size that you haven't loaded a font for. > I saw somewhere (release notes?) that the MSDOS file system may > not work with file systems for DOS after 3.3. I have DOS 6.2.2. > Will this be a problem? It seemed to mount okay, but I was a little > wary of doing much. By the way, it was mounted when things started > to disappear in /usr. It would be bad if the MSDOS file system > caused other file systems to scramble a completely different disk! There have been reports that heavy work on an MSDOS filesystem can cause problems. For straightforward back-and-forth transfers, it doesn't seem to be a problem. > Wish list: > > It would be nice when making partitions if I could pass > parameters to newfs. In particular, I like to make the > "root only" percentage zero on all but the root file > system, and I like to increase the blocks-per-inode value. > I think I will probably have to back things up and remake > file systems after installation to be able to do this. You can. say 'newfs', or 'man newfs' > Speaking of System V, it would also be nice if there were > a way to put entries in /etc/fstab that aren't automatically > mounted so I could say "mount /cdrom" when I want to do that. > Okay, so it's a one-line shell script, but still, it would > be nice. I have lots of these one-line shell scripts, like > mountcd, mountfd, mountdos. I'll probably want to make > read-only versions of the last two. And I will have to make > some more if my Iomega Zip drive ever arrives. There's work on this currently in progress. The initial patches submitted had some problems, but I expect these will be ironed out shortly 8) -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] My car has "demand start" - Terry Lambert [[
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