My .02...

On Feb 10,  4:24pm, Colin Wood wrote:
>Frederick Bruckman wrote:
>> On Sat, 10 Feb 2001, Bob Nestor wrote:
>> > 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.
>> The work-around is to always create the new kernel at the root level.
>> Having a separate root ensures that; size doesn't matter. What happens
>> when you have a single /-/usr-/usr/src/sys is that you're tempted to
>> type "mv netbsd /" to activate your new kernel, but the data doesn't
>> really move -- it's still out there on the high numbered cylinders,
>> where the Booter may not find it. However, if you do, for instance,
>> "cp -p netbsd /", instead, the data always ends up in the first
>> cylinder, and it always seems to work.
>Well, I've managed to hit a few cases where it doesn't.  After littering
>my / directory with something like 20 or 30 kernels, I finally managed to
>push the inodes high enough to get off the first (few?) cylinder(s).  Of
>course, removing some of the older kernels seemed to fix this particular
>problem.

I have an 8GB BSD 4.2 root+usr, build kernels every week (sometimes more
than one), do a `cp netbsd /netbsd.xxx`, and keep the number of kernels
in / to less than 6.  My highest kernel inode right now is 37, and the
others are < 20.  Maybe I just live right....

~Steve


-- 
Steve Allen - wormey@eskimo.com   http://www.eskimo.com/~wormey/   ICQ 6709819

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