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Date:      Sat, 20 Mar 1999 12:20:44 -0800
From:      Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
To:        "David E. Cross" <crossd@cs.rpi.edu>
Cc:        Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com>, =?iso-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren?= Schmidt <sos@freebsd.dk>, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: How to add a new bootdevice to the new boot code ??? 
Message-ID:  <199903202020.MAA12835@dingo.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 20 Mar 1999 15:19:07 EST." <199903202019.PAA08940@cs.rpi.edu> 

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> 
> > > The major number passed to the kernel is a product of a lot of
> > > guesswork, because the loader has simply not enough information. I
> > > have added a bit of code to my version of loader so you can use the
> > > variable root_device_major_number to override the major number to be
> > > passed to the kernel. I'm inclined to commit it, but I expect strong
> > > objections from Mike, who wants the right thing done before we go
> > > too far with these hacks.
> > 
> > Correct.
> > 
> > I'm currently leaning heavily towards a tunable which can be set to 
> > explicitly control the device the root filesystem is loaded from, eg.
> > 
> >  set kern.rootdev.device=da0s1a
> 
> How hard would it be to have /boot/loader get the major number from the
> filesystem itself?  Just have it read the node entry for /dev/$rootdev
> (or similiar).

This doesn't solve the BIOS : FreeBSD unit numbering problem, 
unfortunately, and it would make moving from one driver to another very 
difficult (you'd have to override the search).

It's a neat idea and one I hadn't thought of, but it doesn't solve
enough of the problem.

-- 
\\  Sometimes you're ahead,       \\  Mike Smith
\\  sometimes you're behind.      \\  mike@smith.net.au
\\  The race is long, and in the  \\  msmith@freebsd.org
\\  end it's only with yourself.  \\  msmith@cdrom.com




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