Re: playing with bootxx_ext2fs

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

pierre-philipp braun <pbraun%nethence.com@localhost> writes:

[trimming most]

>> You may be better off with FreeBSD as an installation base.
>
> I will try building the ext2 fs from there.  Actually I am wondering if
> the FreeBSD UFS and NetBSD ones could be somehow compatible.  As a
> matter of fact I could validate that NetBSD FFSv2 could be mounted just
> fine (and RW) from FreeBSD 11.1.

You might check both ffsv1 and ffsv2 created/written from freebsd, for
acceptability by netbsd.  It might be totally ok, or it might be that
with fsck it becomes ok without damage.  And it avoids all the ext2
trouble.  FreeBSD disklabel is probably compatible too.

> Yes that would be an option and it could eventually scale across
> different hardware models.  The rest of the partitioning and system prep
> would be done/scripted on top of that smalling working root file-system.
> Drawback it I would have to rebuild the full smallish disk image at
> every NetBSD release, instead of just updating the deployment script.

You can update in place, over the net, and only need the console if you
have trrouble.  See pkgsrc/sysutils/etcmanage and read the included
scripts carefully.  (There are other approaches but this is the one I
like.)