Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 13:23:32 -0600 (CST) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Support for FreeBSD in an extended slice. Message-ID: <14978.62004.992941.552822@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <200102080713.AAA07197@usr08.primenet.com> References: <14978.16659.207713.3575@guru.mired.org> <200102080713.AAA07197@usr08.primenet.com>
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Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> types: > > People blunder by -questions fairly regularly asking what they need to > > do to put FreeBSD in an extended partition. From the looks of things, > > about 90% of the work to do that has been done. All that's missing is > > fdisk support for extended partitions to create it, and boot > > support. Anyone one to comment on how hard those two things would be? > Creating the partitions and putting Berkeley disktabs on them, > and newfs'ing them is trivial; probably less than a couple dozen > lines of code changes. That would explain why it happened. I think it's synchronicity more than anything else. Support for talking to MS-DOS formatted extended partitions means you have to be able to read the slice description, and once you've got that, making them FreeBSD slices is easy. > The big problem is that the BIOS and the default PC MBR can't > handle booting from them. Most MBR's can't, since there is no > real standard way of marking the thing active (which is the only > way to tell a root partition from a data partition, among other > things). Grub pretty much solves all those problems. It's not something you'd want to use if all you're running is FreeBSD, but in that case you don't need to be able to put FreeBSD in an extended partition. > If you get all that sorted out, you still have to figure out how > to mount the thing as root (which is less trivial than a dozen > lines of code, but quite possible -- might even result in some > code cleanup that's been asking for it for a long time). The kernel knows how to deal with this stuff, so the problem shouldn't be there (unless that's the code that needs cleaning up). Does it possibly happen in /boot/loader? Since grub runs /boot/loader, I was concerned that /boot/loader might not work when run from an extended partition. This also leaves the interesting question of installing FreeBSD in an extended partition. Thanx, <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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