Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 05:22:13 +0900 From: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: =?iso-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren?= Schmidt <sos@freebsd.dk>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How to add a new bootdevice to the new boot code ??? Message-ID: <36F40375.624C03D0@newsguy.com> References: <199903201944.LAA12569@dingo.cdrom.com>
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Mike Smith wrote: > > > The major number passed to the kernel is a product of a lot of > > guesswork, because the loader has simply not enough information. I > > have added a bit of code to my version of loader so you can use the > > variable root_device_major_number to override the major number to be > > passed to the kernel. I'm inclined to commit it, but I expect strong > > objections from Mike, who wants the right thing done before we go > > too far with these hacks. > > Correct. On both accounts, I suppose... :-) > However Justin's random number comment speaks back to a technique I was > working on earlier, where such a number would be secreted in the > disklabel of the disk to be booted. This number would have to be > generated in a fairly unique fashion (I planned to use the TOD to try > to keep it from wrapping), and it'd then be passed in in the > environment or as an argument to the kernel. How would that work with netboot or booting from foreign fs, such as FAT? If we restrict ourselves to disklabel-carrying fs, an alternative would be writing the date&time plus a semi-random number (such as time down to ms) on the disklabel of the disk selected, and passing this number to the kernel. [reads what you said again] Unless, of course, that's precisely what you are talking about... :-) I'm not sure if you are talking about a pre-generated label, or one written at boot time. It all rests on the meaning of TOD (tentatively translated as Time Of Day... :). > However, there's another technique which would work quite well, and one > I'm actually moderately enamoured of (modulo it's ability to confuse > the heck out of people). > > Use the "last mounted on" field to find and mount filesystems. Again, same objections... :-) -- Daniel C. Sobral (8-DCS) dcs@newsguy.com dcs@freebsd.org "What happened?" "It moved, sir!" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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