Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 12:40:10 -0500 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Cc: Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> Subject: Re: nextboot (was Re: boot block differences between 4.x and 6.x ?) Message-ID: <200602011240.11682.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <200602011341.k11Dfbq1008941@lurza.secnetix.de> References: <200602011341.k11Dfbq1008941@lurza.secnetix.de>
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On Wednesday 01 February 2006 08:41, Oliver Fromme wrote: > Julian Elischer wrote: > > Oliver Fromme wrote: > > > [...] > > > I think the most visible changes in the boot blocks was > > > UFS2 support and the removal of nextboot(8) support. > > > > which I hope to put back because we continue to need it. > > I agree that it's needed. It's a very useful feature. > > > (The new nextboot being dependent on the root filesystem still being ok > > which is unacceptable to most embedded devices I've worked on, and why > > we still use the old bootblocks on all systems shipped.). > > > >From my point of view, the biggest problem with the old > > nextboot was the fact that it ignored loader(8) and tried > to load the kernel directly. While that might work under > certain conditions, it's not good in general. > > Therefore I think that a new nextboot implementation > should be implemented in loader itself. Since loader(8) > doesn't (and shouldn't) support writing to UFS2, the > state information should be written to an unused area in > block 2 on the disk, or something similar. In fact, one > byte is sufficient: It can be used as an index into a > table (ASCII text file), e.g. /boot/nextboot.conf. > > Would that be feasible to implement? /boot/loader already does nextboot and does it by using UFS writing (which it does implement and use on archs whose disk drivers support writing such as i386) to overwrite (but not extend) /boot/nextboot.conf. -- John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> <>< http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ "Power Users Use the Power to Serve" = http://www.FreeBSD.org
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