On Thu, 7 Jul 2022, br0nko wrote:
I wanted to resurrect an old i386 alix box, and I did follow the guide to create a custom image trough mkimage (https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-inst-media.html#chap-inst-media-creating-live-images). I did first try on amd64 so that I can first test on my laptop. Build was successful but when I boot the USB key, I'm stuck on primary bootstrap ("NetBSD/x86 ffsv1 Primary Bootstrap"), no error. However I can boot it from grub (installed on the laptop hard-drive), image is fully functional that way.
Right. After ~10 hours of doing `build.sh release' I have a patch. However, I'm not at all certain that this script is meant to be used on the x86 arch. because: a) It only seems to be used by the evbarm and evbmips builds. b) `build live-image' already works (better!) than this script. c) it does very odd things: 1. writes a partition table and an MBR. 2. promptly over-writes it with the primary bootstrap (PBR) and the disklabel, so the system actually boots directly from the PBR. Still, here's the patch: --- diff -urN a/distrib/utils/embedded/mkimage b/distrib/utils/embedded/mkimage --- a/distrib/utils/embedded/mkimage 2021-09-25 08:54:30.000000000 +0000 +++ b/distrib/utils/embedded/mkimage 2022-07-10 08:18:03.575853000 +0000 @@ -255,7 +255,7 @@ echo ${bar} Populating ffs filesystem ${bar} ${MAKEFS} -rx ${endian} -N ${release}/etc -t ffs \ -O ${ffsoffset} \ - -o d=4096,f=8192,b=65536 -b $((${extra}))m \ + -o d=8192,f=2048,b=16384 -b $((${extra}))m \ -F "$tmp/selected_sets" ${image} "${release}" "${mnt}" fi --- 1. Make sure you pass the `-r sd' or `-r wd' flags, otherwise, the script defaults to `ld' and builds an /etc/fstab with that baked in. 2. This doesn't produce a very good live image as a) there's hardly any free space left over, and b) it doesn't grow the root partition like `build.sh live-image' does. I'm don't know what this little oddball script is doing in the Guide... On Sat, 9 Jul 2022, Lloyd Parkes wrote:
63 is a popular offset because the BIOS field for track length can only hold values 0-63.
Of course--I should've remembered that :) -RVP