Re: 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?]

[George Michaelson <ggm%pobox.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:32:37 +1000, Simon Burge wrote:

> 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.

Maybe it was my bad when I tried it, but on my Macbook Pro, I can't get 
the bootblocks which load an i386 kernel under parallels to work for an 
amd kernel as a native boot via EFI.

so, I asked (on this list?) if boot should be multi-arch or not, and got 
no reply. Does this post from you mean that by design, the MBR and /boot 
*should* be able to load either an i386 *or* an AMD kernel?

_G