Re: 5.1-R: rcNG - 'mountall' missing?

Mike Makonnen wrote:
> This stems from the fact that the way we handle filesystems is different from
> the way NetBSD handles it.  For our purposes, we need one pass to mount local
> filesystems and a second one to mount remote ones. 

Ah, okay. I haven't actually been root on a NetBSD box, so I'm not too 
familiar with that side of the fence I'm afraid.

Now, to (maybe) throw a spanner in the works, I'm currently working on a 
couple of scripts to allow the handling of md(4) based filesystems at 
boot time. Personally I have a need for vnode type file systems, but I'm 
making it so that malloc/swap filesystems are also handled (e.g. for /tmp).

The issue that arises from this support is that I can't safely have the 
md devices attach before all the file systems are mounted since I don't 
know on which fs any vnode backing files reside on (and I don't want to 
have to do a two-pass; one for malloc/swap and one for vnode). It could 
potentially be a case where you want/need to attach to a file that's on 
a remote system (via nfs or even smb perhaps).

 From my scripts' point of view this isn't too bad, as I can just depend 
on 'mountall' (or so I think at least), but in doing so I'm perverting 
the meaning of 'mountall', as not all filesystems will be mounted by then.

I'm not sure what the best approach would be, so I'd like some feedback 
on this. Would it be acceptable to introduce another dummy target (like 
FILESYSTEMS)? From a purely FreeBSD perspective I would probably find 
this the cleanest, but I know we need to play nice with NetBSD too (do 
they have anything like md or vn?) so that might stuff things up.

I'm really open to suggestions here, and if there isn't any interest in 
getting md boot-time support into the baseline I'm happy to keep it as a 
set of local patches, but I suspected that if I write it in such a way 
that a swap backed /tmp is possible to achieve with a simple rc.conf 
tweak and a supporting file, then that might be something a number of 
people would be interested in.

I'll post a patch set in a day or two when I've tuned the scripts a bit 
more (hopefully in response to feedback).


> IIRC NetBSD requires that users specify their file systems in rc.conf. This
> might be useful to have on FreeBSD, as long as it's strictly optional, but I
> don't have the time or interest to work on it.

Interesting, but nothing I'd find useful either at the moment, so I'll 
pass on that task :)

Cheers,
/Johny