Subject: Re: Thoughts about wedges
To: matthew green <mrg@towers-of-dub.eterna.com.au>
From: Ignatios Souvatzis <ignatios@cs.uni-bonn.de>
List: tech-kern
Date: 09/26/1999 16:06:55
On Sun, Sep 26, 1999 at 12:26:02PM +1000, matthew green wrote:
>    
>    Yes, you would lose RB_ASKNAME functionality this way, this was already
>    mentioned in the original discussion. If many people rely on this
>    functionality (I'm not sure many people do, besides some developers),
> 
> 
> i have used this functionality in sunos4 and solaris for about
> as many years as i've been using netbsd.  i'd be sorely annoyed
> if it was removed from netbsd -- it is far more useful than for
> just developers.  system administrators use it too.

I agree. It has saved a lot of my asses.


So we either

a) need "boot from a file on partition x, then pass parameters of 
partition y as root device to it" in the bootblock, or

b) optional read-only support for (one or some) supported partition
schemes in the kernel.

I'd vote to keep b) possible. It would link in a (copy of) the read part 
of the partition handling code needed, and this would be called at boot time
to create a couple of entries in the wedge driver.

	...
	partition-scheme	AMIGARDB
	file-system		FFS
	file-system		MFS
	...

This would not interfere with a) functionality, where said functionality fits
into the boot block.

Regards,
	Ignatios
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