Subject: Re: /dev and booting from non-ffs filesystems
To: Gavan Fantom <gavan@coolfactor.org>
From: David Brownlee <abs@netbsd.org>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 01/16/2002 18:37:17
On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Gavan Fantom wrote:

>     bin/15236 init will only create an mfs /dev on an msdos root
>               filesystem
>
> [...]
>
> At the moment, init does an strcmp to see if the root filesystem is of
> type "msdos". As I'm playing with root on a CDROM, "cd9660" != "msdos".
> After checking the filesystem name, init goes on to check that
> /dev/console does not exist.
>
> I *think* that checking for /dev/console existing should be sufficient -
> if /dev/console does not exist, it would be reasonable to assume that
> creating it in an mfs filesystem would be helpful. The second PR contains
> a patch to remove the check for msdos. I would appreciate any thoughts on
> this.
>
> Note that this behaviour is conditional on a compile time option,
> MSDOSFS_ROOT, which appears to be *enabled* by default.

	I'd suggest:
	 - Nuke the msdos check.
	 - Rename the option to something like MFS_DEV_IF_NO_DEV_CONSOLE
	   (maybe a shorter name would be better :).
	 - If hit the code should printf() something to the console after
	   it has created it to warn the user that they now have an mfs
	   dev.

	The only people the change will affect is those booting without
	a /dev/console on non msdosfs. Right now they are hosed, so I
	don't think they could regard this as a regression :)

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