nextboot (was Re: boot block differences between 4.x and 6.x ?)

From: Oliver Fromme <olli_at_lurza.secnetix.de>
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 14:41:37 +0100 (CET)
Julian Elischer wrote:
 > Oliver Fromme wrote:
 > > [...]
 > > I think the most visible changes in the boot blocks was
 > > UFS2 support and the removal of nextboot(8) support.
 > 
 > which I hope to put back because we continue to need it.

I agree that it's needed.  It's a very useful feature.

 > (The new nextboot being dependent on the root filesystem still being ok
 > which is unacceptable to most embedded devices I've worked on, and why
 > we still use the old bootblocks on all systems shipped.).

>From my point of view, the biggest problem with the old
nextboot was the fact that it ignored loader(8) and tried
to load the kernel directly.  While that might work under
certain conditions, it's not good in general.

Therefore I think that a new nextboot implementation
should be implemented in loader itself.  Since loader(8)
doesn't (and shouldn't) support writing to UFS2, the
state information should be written to an unused area in
block 2 on the disk, or something similar.  In fact, one
byte is sufficient:  It can be used as an index into a
table (ASCII text file), e.g. /boot/nextboot.conf.

Would that be feasible to implement?

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd
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Received on Wed Feb 01 2006 - 12:41:45 UTC

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