Date: Thu, 07 Jan 1999 14:04:15 -0800 From: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com> To: Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com> Cc: cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/i386/conf Makefile.i386 Message-ID: <36952F5F.2781E494@whistle.com> References: <199901072037.NAA22536@mt.sri.com> <Pine.BSF.3.95.990107124507.3875I-100000@current1.whistle.com> <199901072101.OAA22809@mt.sri.com>
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Nate Williams wrote: > > > changing the bootblocks is not always an option. > > Sure it is. If you can upgrade the OS, you can certainly upgrade the > bootblocks. I see you complain about this alot, but this is no harder > than typing 'dislabel -B wd0' (or sd0..) > > Besides, you can't boot off the old bootblocks with an ELF kernel > anyway. > > If you're willing to jump to an ELF kernel remotely, then you should be > willing to upgrade the boot blocks remotely. > > Nate Nate you obviously didn't hear ALL of the discussion... The Interjet upgrade process doesn't include code to upgrade the bootblocks, so we (Whistle) are stuck forever needing to support (in some way or other) the old bootblocks in the field. Interjet owners may upgrade their Whistleware(TM) at any time or they may decide to NOT upgrade it. We can't MANDATE that they upgrade. We need to ensure that an Interjet sold 2 years ago can upgrade in 2001 to the latest whistleware(TM), however since the CODE installed in 1996 can't upgrade the bootblocks we need to ensure that the old bootblocks can find something in the new release to boot. It can't be an elf kernel, so it will need to be an a.out 3rd stage loader that can boot the new elf kernel that will be in whatever release of WW we have in 2001. Obviously that old bootblock set will be looking for a file called "kernel". Since we really try to keep WW as close as possible to FreeBSD, I just wish that FreeBSD as a whole considered the ability to run with old bootblocks more important, so that we didn't need to diverge as much.. Your comments are true. However they don't help me very much. Of course it's not FreeBSD's job to make things easy for me, so that's ok, but I think that since Linux uses /Linux, and NetBSD uses /NetBSD and OpenBSD uses (I think) /OpenBSD, using /FreeBSD would make us more 'in line' with the others, and also backwards compatible with systems that are set up with old bootblocks. No matter what FreeBSD does, we will probably have a 3rd stage loader called "kernel". We may also have an intermediate release that you must upgrade to if your release is earlier than some cuttoff point if you are upgrading beyond that point, so that you first upgrade to a version that knows how to upgrade the bootblocks, but consider that most of our custommers don't know what a 'byte' is before you make glib commnts such as "but this is no harder than typing 'dislabel -B wd0' (or sd0..)" and also consider that there is no shell interface. Asking a custommer to upgrade twice in a row for a single upgrade is a big 'custommer satisfaction' thing, that must be taken very seriously. If we are the ONLY people without a shell interface who face this problem with embedded FreeBSD, then I'd be surprised. (But maybe no-one else runs FreeBSD in such an embedded manner as we do). julian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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