>>> [Y]ou'd need to come up with something like the vnd device for the
>>> other systems.  You need to make an ffs on a file... :-(
>> That doesn't demand vnds.  Just something mtoolsish.
> If that were it, yes.  But [a] number of ports have installboot
> programs which need to encode the block addresses of a secondary
> loader into the loader they install.  They usually need the
> filesystem mounted to do this.

That's only because they're a little lazy; they need the inumber of
/boot or /ufsboot or whatever the second-stage boot program is called,
and they get it from stat(2) rather than by walking the path
themselves.  They have to poke at the raw disk anyway to figure out the
block numbers to stuff into the first-stage bootblocks; there's no
*need* for them to get that inumber from stat.

Two of my "ffs via raw disk" programs can do path walks already. :-)

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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