From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Apr 22 18:46:26 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA24271 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 22 Apr 1997 18:46:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from alpo.whistle.com (alpo.whistle.com [207.76.204.38]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA24266 for ; Tue, 22 Apr 1997 18:46:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by alpo.whistle.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA03337; Tue, 22 Apr 1997 18:44:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from current1.whistle.com(207.76.205.22) via SMTP by alpo.whistle.com, id smtpd003335; Wed Apr 23 01:44:44 1997 Message-ID: <335D6977.41C67EA6@whistle.com> Date: Tue, 22 Apr 1997 18:44:23 -0700 From: Julian Elischer Organization: Whistle Communications X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jaye Mathisen CC: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: additional boot stage? References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Jaye Mathisen wrote: > > Occasionally, it seems I'm having to work on machines that aren't close, > and need a bit of kernel tweaking now and then... > > Something I was was thinking would be useful is to have a kernel boot > path, or list of bootable kernels, or some mechanism such that if /kernel > doesn't boot, /kernel.bak boots or some fallback mechanism. > > I was thinking it could be handled if /kernel loaded and tracked the > bootedness or non-bootedness of the next kernel, it would be handy, w/o > having to write/rewrite the bootblocks, which makes me nervous. > > Or something. It would be nice. check out nextboot(8) it puts a list of bootable kernels in block 1 after the fdisk, and zero's out each one as it uses it.. needs the appropriate compile option in the bootblocks (mentionned in the man page)