From owner-freebsd-current Wed Aug 6 16:27:30 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA27572 for current-outgoing; Wed, 6 Aug 1997 16:27:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from helmholtz.salk.edu (helmholtz.salk.edu [198.202.70.34]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA27565 for ; Wed, 6 Aug 1997 16:27:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pauling.salk.edu (pauling [198.202.70.108]) by helmholtz.salk.edu (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id QAA19478; Wed, 6 Aug 1997 16:27:20 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 16:27:16 -0700 (PDT) From: Tom Bartol To: George Michaelson cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: modifying boot mgrs FROM FREEBSD In-Reply-To: <27991.870908958@connect.com.au> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Thu, 7 Aug 1997, George Michaelson wrote: > I also had this idea. I suspect that for the critical purpose: writing back > that the current opsys is to be rebooted to irrespective of what tunings > the manager has, this would do. > > But there are lots of reasons why its a bad move. its another critical path > to go wrong if you change the boot manager in unexpected ways. If the damn > thing is installed and hosted from inside FreeBSD, then changes are likely > to be made in ways which are self-consistent. Yes, this is certainly a big concern. If your master copy of the boot blocks lives inside FreeBSD then all will be well but then this would not be convenient from other environments... And of course whatever randomly chosen boot manager you happen to be using won't generally be tunable from any randomly chosen OS anyway, nor will there generally exist such powerful low-level I/O tools like dd. If your goal is to able to tune your boot blocks from "wherever you are" you're going to have to hold your breath for lots of different OSes to get it together (i.e. it ain't gonna happen). At least with FreeBSD, the tools exist now to do this sort of thing, even if you do have to roll your own. :-) > > I think Jordans comments stand: don't hold your breath. > > -George > And don't bang your head against the wall either... Just climb over it! Tom