On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Curt Sampson wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, der Mouse wrote:
> 
> > I've been trying to think of some way to handle things so that the
> > number of partitions per pack can change without causing upgrade hell
> > for people who have trouble with handling that overlap interval.  I
> > haven't come up with a scheme I'm really satisfied with, yet; I'd love
> > to discuss this with anyone who has any ideas on the matter.
> 
> I can think of a couple of ways to do it; both are nasty.
> 
> You could have the kernel go and look up /dev/sd1a and /dev/wd1a
> on the root partition and see what the minor numbers are, and
> configure itself based on that.

Why is this so nasty? We would be having the kernel configure itself
acording to the /dev it sees. I realize that the tradition is to have a
user process configure the kernel, but in this case, we don't have much
choice. We really want to know what's up before we ever have a user
process. For instance, if we were to boot single-user, we really should
have all this stuff set before init runs.

> You could have a sysctl variable to set it, and have a user process
> look at /dev/sd1a and /dev/wd1a to see what to do.

I think having a sysctl would be good. Letting root change it on the fly'd
be good (assuming all devices of that type, sd, wd, vnd, are closed). But
I think we need it configured before then.

Take care,

Bill