Re: two NetBSD images on the same disk?

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 08:57:51PM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> For reasons given below, I would like to have two different bootable
> NetBSD images on the same disk.  Is this possible?  At one point at
> least, I seem to recall that root could only be on the 'a' slice, and
> that slice definitions were per-disk, not per-fdisk partition.
> 
> More specifically -- I have a remote machine running xen3/i386/4.0.  I
> would like to upgrade it to xen33/amd64/5.0, but the thought of trying
> to do that remotely is, shall we say, daunting.  However -- the disk
> (well, disks; there's a RAID setup that complicates things) has a free
> fdisk partition that's easily big enough for an amd64 dom0.
> 
> So -- what I would like to do is to install (probably by hand)
> amd64/5.0 in that partition.  I'd then like to boot it -- first
> stand-alone, later as a dom0.  It's easy enough to configure grub to do
> that, but will NetBSD be happy?

It should, at last with the netbsd-5 /boot - assuming that grub
will give /boot the proper informations.
If you upgrade your xen3/i386/4.0's /boot to the netbsd-5 one, you
can boot i386 or amd64 kernels from any partition (I don't remmeber
if the 4.0's /boot can do that).
Just copy a netbsd-5 /usr/mdec/boot to /boot.

> Next -- assuming I can boot the amd64 partition, can it mount the i386
> file system, for access to the vnd disk images of the domUs?

Yes, no problems.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           
Manuel.Bouyer%lip6.fr@localhost
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--