On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 06:45:13PM -0400, Lalor, Chris wrote:
> As per Luke's changes committed 20001030, the -current bootblocks have
> support for booting off of a RAID1 mirror. The commit also mentions that
> installboot(8) does not yet have support for installing bootblocks to
> such a mirror. Has this support been added (as I see no such
> announcements) or is there a way to get around this and install the
> bootblock in some other manor?

installboot(8) hasn't been hacked to install the first stage booter
on the underlying physical component and the second stage boot
(/boot) on the raidXa device; I took a look at this and solving
this is non trivial and ugly.

My workaround was to create a small 4.2BSD partition near the physical
start of the disk on the underlying device (e.g, `wd0h', starting at
offset 63), installboot to wd0h, have the kernel on raid0a (disklabel
type `4.2BSD') which is composed of wd0a/wd1a (disklabel type `RAID'),
and use raid autoconfig. The boot sequence is:

	- The MBR bootblock in MBR executes the bootblock in
	  NetBSD 0xA9 partition

	- The first stage NetBSD bootblock then loads /boot from
	  hard-coded sectors (which happen to be physically located
	  in wd0h)

	- /boot - the second stage bootblock - searchs for the kernel
	  off the boot device and loads it.  I can't recall if I
	  had to put a kernel in wd0h or if /boot assumes the kernel
	  is on the first partition of the boot device and therefore
	  uses wd0a; it's been nearly 12 months since I used this
	  setup (I now use hardware raid cards). `Suck it and see'.

	- The kernel fires up, finds the disks, autoconfigures the
	  raid devices, and sets the root device to raid0a.
	  fstab has / on /dev/raid0a, etc.  Things work from there.

Luke.

PS: I think I sent a message to current-users or port-i386 about this
a while ago; check the email ;-)