Mike Smith wrote:
>
> > This is used successfullly in the thousands of interjets out there in
> > the field. Unfortunatly the new bootblock writers never considered
> > this an important enough feature to emulate.
> > but it gives you a place to look.
>
> One of the "new bootblock authors" actually commented on this thread,
> including some of the reasons why this approach wasn't taken...
Our theory was that if the root filesystem was hosed we didn't want to look IN
the filesystem for boot configuration.. so we put it in non-filesystem space.
Our root filesystems are also read-only and cannot therefore be used for
writeback.
block0: reads bootstrings from block1, zeros out first string, writes back puts
first string on stack.
boot1: read string off stack and use as default.
If the root filesystem was screwed on upgrade (for example the power failed
during a system upgrade), the next boot would fail and after retrying, the
system would revert to using the secondary root filesystem.
If the boot information was IN the root filesystem, like the current system
wants,
we'd have been screwed. As it is, if the power fails uring rewriting block 1
then the magic numbers would fail, and it would be ignored, booting off the 'a'
partition.
the current ideas all fail badly in the face of 'a' partition filesystem
corruption.
>
> --
> ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his
> rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want
> to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force
> people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt]
> V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E
--
__--_|\ Julian Elischer
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( OZ ) World tour 2000
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