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.

Also, I would strongly recommend keeping a root partition larger than
20MB.  The (rather unfortunate) tendancy in NetBSD over the last few
revisions has been for the size of the root partition to grow slightly
(things keep moving from /usr/bin and /usr/sbin to /bin and /sbin).  As
such, you might wind up with a root partition that's too small to hold a
new distribution, even if you have a separate /var, /usr, and /home.  This
would _suck_ ;-)  Of course, I didn't re-calculate the sizes for the 1.5
release, so I'm not quite sure what the current size requirements are.
I'll try to do that for 1.5.1.

-Colin