Re: preparing netbsd boot straps from gnu/linux

[pierre-philipp braun <pbraun%nethence.com@localhost>]

>> It is irregular to not have a disklabel on the netbsd system disk.  I
>> don't mean wrong, and I don't mean can't work.  But it is not normal.
>> The more you stray from normal, the greater the likelihood of trouble.
> 
> It also doesn't work in many cases because the fictitious disklabel
> doesn't hold all necessary parameters for foreign filesystems
> (and for FFS it's guesswork).

This has all changed now thanks you your enhancements on fsck_ext2fs.  I
am using fictious labels all the way for XEN/PV, XEN/HVM and even
bare-metal.  As a result I have a working script that automates the
installation of netbsd on ext2fs from gnu/linux.

There is a strange incompatibility issue between /dev as tmpfs while /
is ext2fs.  I always got `mtree: .: Invalid argument` when trying to
`ls` in there.  So I included two passes of MAKEDEV generation, to avoid
the use of the tmpfs failover.  The first from gnu/linux but it misses
proper ownerships (mknod w/o -F -R -r -g -u).  The second for ownerships
fixup at startup.

When doing MAKEDEV at very early stage onto `/etc/rc` I end-up with
`Inappropriate ioctl for device`.  So I simply put the device file
ownership fixup onto `/etc/rc.local`, with a simple lock mechanism to
avoid repeating those at boot time every time.  I wonder if doing `-u`
would be enough.  But most importantly I wonder if I SHOULD force a
reboot after fixing the device permissions.

So much Thanks
-- 
Pierre-Philipp Braun
SNE Russia https://os3.su/