This stems from the fact that the way we handle filesystems is different from
the way NetBSD handles it. For our purposes, we need one pass to mount local
filesystems and a second one to mount remote ones.
Ah, okay. I haven't actually been root on a NetBSD box, so I'm not too familiar with that side of the fence I'm afraid.
Now, to (maybe) throw a spanner in the works, I'm currently working on a couple of scripts to allow the handling of md(4) based filesystems at boot time. Personally I have a need for vnode type file systems, but I'm making it so that malloc/swap filesystems are also handled (e.g. for /tmp).
The issue that arises from this support is that I can't safely have the md devices attach before all the file systems are mounted since I don't know on which fs any vnode backing files reside on (and I don't want to have to do a two-pass; one for malloc/swap and one for vnode). It could potentially be a case where you want/need to attach to a file that's on a remote system (via nfs or even smb perhaps).
From my scripts' point of view this isn't too bad, as I can just depend on 'mountall' (or so I think at least), but in doing so I'm perverting the meaning of 'mountall', as not all filesystems will be mounted by then.
I'm not sure what the best approach would be, so I'd like some feedback on this. Would it be acceptable to introduce another dummy target (like FILESYSTEMS)? From a purely FreeBSD perspective I would probably find this the cleanest, but I know we need to play nice with NetBSD too (do they have anything like md or vn?) so that might stuff things up.
I'm really open to suggestions here, and if there isn't any interest in getting md boot-time support into the baseline I'm happy to keep it as a set of local patches, but I suspected that if I write it in such a way that a swap backed /tmp is possible to achieve with a simple rc.conf tweak and a supporting file, then that might be something a number of people would be interested in.
I'll post a patch set in a day or two when I've tuned the scripts a bit more (hopefully in response to feedback).
IIRC NetBSD requires that users specify their file systems in rc.conf. This might be useful to have on FreeBSD, as long as it's strictly optional, but I don't have the time or interest to work on it.
Interesting, but nothing I'd find useful either at the moment, so I'll pass on that task :)
Cheers, /Johny
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