Daniel Parks wrote:

>At 10:41 AM -0600 2/10/2001, Bob Nestor wrote:
>>If you install using Sysinst you won't be able to use the MacOS Installer
>>application, but you shouldn't need it anyway.  It doesn't recognize the
>>filesystem used by Sysinst.  The Booter application still works, but
>>usually only on small root filesystems.  For that reason it's almost
>>required that you allocate separate root, swap and usr filesystems as a
>>minimum. Keep the root filesystem small, probalby no larger than 16Meg.
>
>Huh? My root is, well, look at my disklabel:

Notice I didn't say it would always screw up.  If you do your own kernel 
builds on a system with a combined root&usr that is BSD 4.3 format you 
will probably end up with a problem sooner or later.  The inode number of 
the kernel will eventually be assigned to a value that the Booter can't 
get to and your system will be unbootable.  The simplest way to avoid 
this is to use a separate, small root partition, prefereably one that is 
BSD 4.2 format. But that's not easily done with Sysinst which always uses 
BSD 4.3 format.  The "newfs" part of Sysinst is in the machine 
independent portion of the code.

>
>a, of course, is my root partition. 940+ MB. What kind of problems 
>should be showing up? I use the booter to boot /netbsd, and I 
>installed with almost no difficulties -- just that it doesn't like 
>installing on two HDs -- with sysinst.
>
The two disk configuration is a Sysinst-ism, not related to the mac68k 
port itself.

>Oh, and I partitioned this disk with sysinst too. This was installing 
>1.5_ALPHA2.
>
Really? The last time I checked the code wasn't there that would read and 
reprocess the Apple Disk Partition Map after it had been modified 
on-disk.  To get this done in the current setup is to reboot the system 
after the disk map is written to disk.  The only exception that I know of 
is the NetBSD 1.4.2 Installation Kernel I built with special kernel mods, 
and that kernel was never placed on the NetBSD Server.  It's only 
available from me.

The early version (pre-1.5) of Sysinst/mac68k has some problems with 
partition sizes and on some disks reports errors in the Disk Partition 
Map.  Some of this may be an artifact of certain 3rd party disk 
formatters too.
 
>
>Maybe I got an "early" version of sysinst. (Well, it was 1.5_ALPHA2).
>
No, by early I mean any version before 1.5.  I did the original code 
under 1.3.2 and Colin Wood debugged it for 1.4 and placed it in the 
source tree.  There were some serious problems in the disk partitioning 
code in that version.  The 1.4.2 Installation Kernel (and probably 1.4.3) 
is based on that early version.  For 1.5 I re-wrote much of the disk 
partitioning code and put checks in to make sure the in-core map matched 
the on-disk map before allowing Sysinst to proceed.  The kernel mods I 
used in my 1.4.2 version aren't in the source tree and obviously aren't 
in the 1.5 version, so I'm not sure how you mananged to partition the 
disk sucessfully with it.  As far as I can tell all the 1.5 Installation 
kernels are built using the updated version of my code which was put in 
the source tree by Allen Briggs.

>What needs to be done to insure that sysinst doesn't screw the 
>partition map up? (Or whatever it does that's bad.)

Nothing.  To the best of my knowledge Sysinst doesn't screw up the 
partition map all by itself.  The problem is that once a new map is 
written to disk there's no way for the kernel to re-process the map and 
adjust it's in-core map which is used for all disk I/O in NetBSD.  There 
are plans to install a more robust label facility in the kernel in a 
machine independent way since mac68k isn't the only port with problems 
like this. When those changes are implemented they can be used in 
Sysinst/mac68k.  That should only be a minor modification.

By the way, a similar problem apparantly exists in MacOS with the pdisk 
utility used by MkLinux.  If you read their source code and instructions 
they tell you to immediately re-boot the system after changing the 
on-disk Partition Map so MacOS has the proper view of the disk 
organization.

hope this helps,
-bob