From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Oct 1 22:15:36 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id WAA03805 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 1 Oct 1996 22:15:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu (UX2.SP.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.198.102]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id WAA03797 for ; Tue, 1 Oct 1996 22:15:33 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost by ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu id aa00131; 2 Oct 96 1:15 EDT To: "Kevin P. Neal" cc: Poul-Henning Kamp , Jason Thorpe , "Justin T. Gibbs" , James Graham , hackers@freebsd.org, tech-kern@netbsd.org Subject: Re: VPS mailing list, BSD interest? In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 02 Oct 1996 01:01:48 EDT." <1.5.4.32.19961002050148.008cf4c8@mindspring.com> Date: Wed, 02 Oct 1996 01:14:55 -0400 Message-ID: <122.844233295@ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu> From: Chris G Demetriou Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > Monkeywrench! How can you have an LFS root partition (never mind the LVM > stuff), and still be able to boot on, say, a Sun3? I mean, doesn't the > boot prom have to be able to read the file system to load the loader > program? Where are you going to stuff boot.sun3? Or a DECstation kernel? > This could get ugly. Not on sane (at least in this respect 8-) architectures. Sane architectures typically read the first N blocks off the disk, or read something in a well-known format from the first block of the disk that indicates what other blocks to read. Firmware which incorporates file system knowledge is Evil, and i'm not aware of any current workstation-class hardware that ships with firmware which attempts to (directly) understand file systems. (I could be wrong, since i'm not intimately familiar with too many machines' boot processes, but i think that, at least in this respect, the overall brokenness of new systems is decreasing.) Yes, on a sun3 or DECstation, you're going to lose, but that's not that big a deal, at least to me. chris