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Re: Proposal to enhance boot path selections



On Sun, 11 May 2025, Greg Troxel wrote:

Paul Goyette <paul%whooppee.com@localhost> writes:

With the recent changes, specifying /onetbsd will only look for a
kernel in /onetbsd and /onetbsd.gz (both being regular files);  it
will not look in /onetbsd/kernel or /onetbsd/kernel.gz as might be
expected.

If one is accustomed to booting with the leading slash it could be
disconcerting (or worse) to not having ingrained muscle-memory boot
the old kernel as expected.

My $0.02 is that I had no idea that 'boot foo' would try to load
foo/kernel, and that I find this unintuitive and not really helpful.

Reading boot(8) on current amd64, I see that boot is specified to take
"filename" and there is no mention of directories.  The man page kind of
implies that filename must be the name of a file in the root directory.
There's no suggestion that it makes sense to have leading slash.
There's no suggestion that one can give a pathname rather than a
filename.

Thus I suspect I am missing something.

Yup, I think you're missing the fact that all of this relates to the
ratther new-ish KERNEL_DIR option, support for which was only recently
completed (by myself).  KERNEL_DIR is described briefly in options(4),
and it is noted in both CHANGES and UPDATING.

In short, KERNEL_DIR provides a mechanism to keep a kernel and its
associated modules together, addressing one of the most common
complaints about modules.

Sorry for not making this more clear.


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