Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 18:40:13 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rkw@dataplex.net (Richard Wackerbarth) Cc: doconnor@gsoft.com.au (Daniel O'Connor), freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: How about building modules along with the kernel? Message-ID: <200004261840.LAA06879@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <00042604130602.06932@nomad.dataplex.net> from "Richard Wackerbarth" at Apr 26, 2000 04:13:06 AM
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> > The loader can (and does) already read UFS.. > > > > It can read files in and load them into arbitarily named sections in the > > kernel, and other good things :) > > But what about JFS, E2FS, KFS, etc. ? Historical UNIX implementations have handled this with a flat filesystem, usually called "stand", where the kernel and any modules needed to access the locally instantiated filesystem implementations are installed. NT's boot loader approaches this the same way, though their "stand" is actually a FAT partition. At this point, it might be just as easy to use "FAT" for this, since many architectures have a requirement for FAT support anyway, or minimally, DOS partitioning. Both the PReP and Open Firmware, as well as the Alpha ARC BIOS, have these requirements for example. In general, one might consider an ELF section archiver, which can modify an ELF module to include support for any filesystem module of your choice, at boot and kernel installation time; this kind of assumes the ability to bootstrap to an ELF module. Some older systems, and some current Linux systems, and NetBSD, at least at one time, used knowledge of the linear sector address of kernel sectors, in order to load the kernel from wherever it happened to be stored, completely ignoring the filesystem format. This seems less flexible than the "stand" approach. NB: "stand" does not mean "/stand", it means a seperate partition set aside for the boot loader, which the boot loader would always be able to understand, regardless of what you did to the format of the rest of the disk. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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