Re: dk wedges vs netbsd -current

[mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost (Michael van Elst)]

gcw%pobox.com@localhost (Geoff Wing) writes:

>Hi,
>I reinstalled an old i386 hardware server with 7.1 a couple of weeks ago.
>Still going strong with a 19 year old Quantum Fireball SE4.3A HD.

>The system installed as an old MBR (+63 sector) system.

I doubt that anything else makes any sense because that's the only thing
the BIOS can boot from.


> It did not add any dk stuff for /etc/fstab.

dk stuff is required for using disks formatted with GPT. It is disabled
(even in the kernel) for standard format using a disklabel to avoid any
surprises.


> It did NOT leave room to add the dk stuff at the start of the hard drive,

dk stuff doesn't need any extra room, it's completely orthogonal
to the disk format.

GPT usually leaves more space unused at the beginning than MBR.


>  so
>  you cannot do "dkscan_bsdlabel" stuff on it and add bootloaders.

No need to scan for disklabels if the kernel already uses the disklabel.
But this has nothing to do with "adding bootloaders". I can only imagine
that you want to add boot managers in UEFI style, which is something
that your old i386 system doesn't support.



> -current does not have lots of the DKWEDGE_METHOD_* stuff in it so you cannot
>  boot a new kernel on it.

-current will happily use a disk formatted with disklabel. So if you want
you can boot -current on your i386 system.



>Where is the philosophy of least-surprise going with this?

>Hopefully we can have more DKWEDGE_METHOD* compatibility shivs in, given we
>also compile with things like COMPAT_* for whatever old binaries lie around.

DKWEDGE_METHOD_BSDLABEL was added to -current once, but reverted when
this indeed suprised many people. Since then, more support for wedges
was added to userland so that we may retry this in the future. On
my systems I regularly have DKWEDGE_METHOD_BSDLABEL enabled.

-- 
-- 
                                Michael van Elst
Internet: mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost
                                "A potential Snark may lurk in every tree."