boot off multiple partitions on same disk [was: The run-time linker doesn't deal with magic symlinks (or even plain symlinks) for shared objects?]

[Simon Burge <simonb%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Johan Ihren wrote:

> I want to use the @machine magic symlink to be able to install both  
> i386 and amd64 distributions into the same root.
> 
> The primary reason is that I run NetBSD/i386 Xen3 in production, which  
> requires a release version, but I'm porting my stuff to NetBSD/amd64  
> Xen3, which is only available as -current. Being able to choose at  
> boot time which one to run would be *very* convenient, especially for  
> laptops with only one disk.

Ignoring magic symlinks totally for a moment, you could do what you want
with multiple root partitions.  I've got a couple of machines here with
two or more small root partitions then common shared swap and /home
partitions.  I then use boot.cfg(5) to choose between then at boot time.
One system has four root filesystems - each of i386 and amd64 with
netbsd-4 and netbsd-current.

Cheers,
Simon.