Re: Root Filesystem Size Rquirement for NetBSD 10?

[Stan Johnson <userm57%yahoo.com@localhost>]

On 6/5/24 11:16 PM, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 05, 2024 at 06:32:47PM -0600, Stan Johnson wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Does anyone know whether there is a size requirement for the root
>> filesystem in NetBSD 10.0 on mac68k when using the sysinst installer?
>
> The official boot loader is unable to use 10 byte SCSI read commands,
> so the limit to access all files fully should be at 1 GB.

ok, thanks, that seems to be what's happening.

> ...
> I started with 2.0.1a6 from Nigel Pearson. I compiled with MPW.
> Sometime in-between my external SCSI disk where this all lived
> died, so no full source set, but the file read_disk.c was the
> only one with real changes (besides some ifdef mess for build
> fixes).

I've looked for MPW (what version?) for years, but I've never found it.
But I'm a bad enough programmer in GCC that even fining MPW probably
wouldn't help. I do have Think C 4.0 (I think the last version was 5.0),
but that probably wouldn't work, either.

Yeah, old SCSI disks are starting to die around now, even NOS ones from
10 or 20 years ago. I switched to SCSI2SD when it became about as cheap
as buying real disks, then BlueSCSI now that SCSI2SD has mostly gone
away. I haven't tried ZuluSCSI or MacSD (though MacSD limits filesystems
to 2 GiB since it uses Win32 partitioning).

On 6/6/24 12:22 AM, John Klos wrote:
>>> Does anyone know whether there is a size requirement for the root
>>> filesystem in NetBSD 10.0 on mac68k when using the sysinst installer?
>>
>> The official boot loader is unable to use 10 byte SCSI read commands,
>> so the limit to access all files fully should be at 1 GB.
> 
> Because of this, and because of the lack of support for FFSv2, one
> option is to create a small FFSv1 partition towards the beginning of the
> disk which has the kernel, then have a large FFSv2 partition to use as /.

Oddly enough, the booter seems to be able to read FFSv2 just fine (at
least it was able to read /netbsd for a long time until that file seems
to have started going outside the 1 GiB boundary). Is it normal for
FFSv1 tools to be able to read an FFSv2 partition up to the 1 GiB boundary?

> 
> Or, to get around Booter's restrictions more directly, you can boot the
> kernel from the MacOS HFS partition and you can install
> pkgsrc/sysutils/hfsutils to copy new kernels to the HFS partition when
> it's time to upgrade.

ok, thanks. I'd have to create a new HFS partition at the start of my
HFS disk, since it's also well over 1 GiB.

> 
>> There are patches and a recent thread about this that is trying to update
>> the boot loader, but so far nothing came out of it. If you can update the
>> booter manually you can try
>>
>>     ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/martin/mac68k/booter.sea.hqx
>>
>> from the README in that directory:
>>
>> This binaries are a variant of the mac68k booter to load the kernel from
>> bigger scsi disks.
>>
>> I started with 2.0.1a6 from Nigel Pearson.
>> I compiled with MPW.
>> Sometime in-between my external SCSI disk where this all lived died, so
>> no full source set, but the file read_disk.c was the only one with real
>> changes (besides some ifdef mess for build fixes).
> 
> Would love to see this happen. I've been trying to assemble the pieces
> needed to set up a MacOS development system for a while, but the lack of
> remote access has made this not all that easy.
> 
> John

I agree, though I know everyone has time constraints and other
committments. I'd like to see all of the MacOS tools (booter, installer,
and Mkfs) support FFSv2 as well as large disks. That would make the
Traditional Insttallation Method useful again. And it seems required for
the booter, though many users may never notice the problem, since the
kernel gets installed first and it isn't typically updated, so rolling
the dice and hoping that it's in the first 1 GiB should be a good bet.

I think I'll try a sysinst installation with these partitions (in a 16
GiB disk image in BlueSCSI):

sd2a: /     -- in the first 1 GiB including driver and partition table
sd2b: swap  -- 256 MiB
sd2d: /data -- balance of disk
sd2g: /usr  -- 4 GiB

-Stan