Hi,
On 28-Mar-99 Warner Losh wrote:
> In message <XFMail.990328182602.Harald.Koerfgen@home.ivm.de> Harald
> Koerfgen writes:
>: Well, I don't like this too. On the other hand, I don't see any benefit
>: from writing bootblocks or a two stage boot process when the PROM is
>: able
>: to handle this nicely for us.
>
> You might want to look into the new bootblocks that were just
> committed to the NetBSD tree. They are quite powerful. You will
> likely not be able to get the PROMs to do everything you want on the
> DECstations. The NetBSD folks have been dealing with the boot problem
> for literally years and likely have an excellent grasp on all the
> subtle issues involve.
>
> No slight intened against the people working on this, but I really
> hate to see the wheel reinvented yet again :-(.
I hate this as well but there are technical reasons to do so, I'm afraid
:-(.
AFAIK ext2, unlike ufs and ffs, doesn't reserve space for a bootloader
except block 0 of a partition. I hope I am wrong here, but I haven't found
anything in that direction.
That means that a two stage boot process, like Ultrix and NetBSD do it, is
a no go if you want to have an ext2 filesystem as the first partition on
a disk.
Maybe I am making the wrong assumptions here and I'd appreciate if someone
with more knowledge of ext2 can correct me.
---
Regards,
Harald
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