Re: Root Filesystem Size Rquirement for NetBSD 10?

[John Klos <john%klos.com@localhost>]

Hi,

> 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.

I have MPW somewhere in an attic, but on the other side of the country, on 
floppy disk. When I find it, I do hope those disks can be read ;)

> 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).

I've used SCSI2SD, although most of my Macs compile 24/7 and get in to 
swap somewhat heavily, so SD cards for me aren't the best option. What 
I've found is that old SCSI to IDE adapters, along with IDE to SATA 
adapters, and a nice, new 2.5" disk or SSD work wonderfully.

Another option is I've bought many 70 gig, 2.5", SCA connected UW-320 SCSI 
disks from eBay for about $15 each. They're usually used for servers, so 
they seem to be quite robust.

> > 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?

I may've conflated those two issues.

> > 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.

You can use the HFS partition from which MacOS boots, if you like, 
although nothing's stopping you from making another just for kernels and 
such.

> 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.

A good cleanup is definitely in order :)

Thanks,
John