Date: Tue, 01 Oct 1996 22:44:43 -0700 From: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU> To: Chris G Demetriou <Chris_G_Demetriou@ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu> Cc: "Kevin P. Neal" <kpneal@pobox.com>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.tfs.com>, Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>, "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@freefall.freebsd.org>, James Graham <greywolf@siva.captech.com>, hackers@freebsd.org, tech-kern@netbsd.org, jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU Subject: Re: VPS mailing list, BSD interest? Message-ID: <199610020544.WAA24656@Pescadero.DSG.Stanford.EDU> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Oct 1996 01:14:55 EDT." <122.844233295@ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
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In message <122.844233295@ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu>Chris G Demetriou writes > >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. >Yes, on a sun3 or DECstation, you're going to lose, but that's not >that big a deal, at least to me. Wrong, at least on DECstations. They're ``sane'' by your description; very like the TC alphas, in fact. The lossage on DECstations is that there's no good way to set anything in the PROM that indicates to the kernel which partition to use as root. We could always invent a syntax for encoding root partitions for kernels that prompt for a root partition. It's getting autoboot to DTTR, or specifying it to the PROM instead of a generic-style kernel, that's problematic. (The other lossage is that I haven't discovered a realiable, sufficiently low-pain installation procedure, but that's another story).
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