On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Peter Seebach wrote:

> The boot.default stuff, well, it's a fair bit of work, but MAN is it useful.
> For those who have never seen it:
> 	* The boot loader loads a file called /etc/boot.default
> 	* It can also take commands entered by hand
> 	* Commands may pass parameters to the rest of the boot loader or
> 	  the kernel
> That's it, but consider the following /etc/boot.default lines:
> 	# suppress ultra2 probe on target 2 on aic0, because we happen
> 	# to know that the disk's firmware is dodgy
> 	-parm aic0 ultra2=all-t2
> 	# only probe up to 1GB of memory on dodgy old pentium board
> 	-extendend 1G
> 	# load ramdisk
> 	-ramdisksize 2048k
> 	-ramdiskfile filesys.gz
> 	# load kernel from one disk, put root on another
> 	-kernel sd(0,0):/netbsd.old
> 	-rootdev wd(0,0)
> 	# force disable of ehci driver on this machine
> 	-dev ehci* port=-1

Some of this can be done with userconf.

Maybe userconf can be extended to provide what's missing?

Maybe userconf can use some configuration file (simply containing the
commands)?

This could be useful to set the timezone before real boot, for example.

Also (as mentioned in another posting), FreeBSD's loader does some of
this. I use it under FreeBSD to make sure kernel modules are loaded early.
Here are some man pages:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=loader&sektion=8&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+5.1-current
http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=loader.conf&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD%205.1-current&format=html

Here is a BSD/OS man page:
http://cnidr.org/cgi-bin/bsdi-man?proto=1.1&apropos=0&msection=ALL&query=boot

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/

p.s. By the way, I based my binary security updates on BSD/OS mods.