Jaromir Dolecek <dolecek@ics.muni.cz> writes:
> "Chris G. Demetriou" wrote:
> > however, there's still the issue of consistency.  There's no reason
> > the bootxx_* blocks should look for different secondaries
> > ...
> 
> So that booting off floppy using new bootlock with hard disk
> with old ones will work ?

This doesn't make sense.  What do you mean?

note that:

* the new alpha primaries (no hard-coded block #s) are backward
compatible with the old alpha secondaries (meant to be used w/ the
primaries that hardcoded block #s).  In fact, iirc, the interface
between the primary and secondary boot blocks remained the same (and i
went to pains to make that happen, by e.g. carefully placing the
primaries' heap), _just_ the method of loading the secondary changed.

* the alpha primary bootstraps must load the secondaries from the same
device that the primaries came from, and the secondries in turn must
load the kernel from the same device.  It's annoying, but working
around it in any sane manner is fairly difficult and failure-prone.


cgd
-- 
Chris Demetriou - cgd@netbsd.org - http://www.netbsd.org/People/Pages/cgd.html
Disclaimer: Not speaking for NetBSD, just expressing my own opinion.