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Date:      Wed, 02 Oct 1996 01:14:55 -0400
From:      Chris G Demetriou <Chris_G_Demetriou@ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
To:        "Kevin P. Neal" <kpneal@pobox.com>
Cc:        Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.tfs.com>, Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>, "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@freefall.freebsd.org>, James Graham <greywolf@siva.captech.com>, hackers@freebsd.org, tech-kern@netbsd.org
Subject:   Re: VPS mailing list, BSD interest? 
Message-ID:  <122.844233295@ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Oct 1996 01:01:48 EDT." <1.5.4.32.19961002050148.008cf4c8@mindspring.com> 

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> Monkeywrench! How can you have an LFS root partition (never mind the LVM
> stuff), and still be able to boot on, say, a Sun3? I mean, doesn't the
> boot prom have to be able to read the file system to load the loader
> program? Where are you going to stuff boot.sun3? Or a DECstation kernel?
> This could get ugly. 

Not on sane (at least in this respect 8-) architectures.

Sane architectures typically read the first N blocks off the disk,
or read something in a well-known format from the first block of the
disk that indicates what other blocks to read.

Firmware which incorporates file system knowledge is Evil, and i'm not
aware of any current workstation-class hardware that ships with
firmware which attempts to (directly) understand file systems.  (I
could be wrong, since i'm not intimately familiar with too many
machines' boot processes, but i think that, at least in this respect,
the overall brokenness of new systems is decreasing.)


Yes, on a sun3 or DECstation, you're going to lose, but that's not
that big a deal, at least to me.


chris



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