On 03/30/15 14:05, RD Thrush wrote:
On 03/30/15 10:12, Peter Kay wrote:
On 30 March 2015 13:03:36 BST, RD Thrush <open...@st.thrush.com> wrote:
The OP's OpenBSD partition is located above 128G, ie. sector
start=842752000, which may have led to the complicated work-around.
I'm pretty certain the artificial 128GB limit was removed a few releases back
- I've installed above that with no issues. Don't know if there's a new,
ludicrously high limit
The FAQ reiterates the 128G limit[1]. I don't have any large drives to verify.
However, current source for amd64/i386 installboot shows:
x2:usr.sbin/installboot 72>grep -C1 -n BOOTBIOS_MAXSEC
/usr/src/usr.sbin/installboot/i386_installboot.c
188-
189: if (start + (blksize / dl->d_secsize) > BOOTBIOS_MAXSEC)
190- warnx("%s extends beyond sector %u. OpenBSD might not boot.",
191: stage1, BOOTBIOS_MAXSEC);
192-
[1]<http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#LargeDrive>
this is a BIOS problem, as is stated in that very FAQ article. I think
you are misreading what is there.
BIOSs that could boot over 128G have been around for well over a decade
now...and BIOSs with bugs that can't have STILL been cropping up very
recently. I can't imagine an OpenBSD patch which would solve this
problem -- it's not an OpenBSD problem.
When Tom rewrote our boot loader to get rid of the 8G limit (OpenBSD
v3.3 or 3,4, IIRC), I grabbed a (new, expensive ...) 160G disk and stuck
it on a super cheap sempron 64 mobo, and loaded OpenBSD in the last 10G
of the disk...and it worked fine. And for a number of years, it seemed
that my piece of junk "how little can I pay to get into amd64" mobo was
the ONLY one with a bios that would boot beyond the 128G point.
Apparently, a few devs got bit by this problem and they inserted the
warning you see, which I'm not overly fond of (documenting BIOS bugs
could double our source code size!), but I've had pretty good luck just
doing installs putting OpenBSD anywhere on the disk I feel like -- and
usually putting it at the end of the disk so less capable OSs will have
a place to install.
back to the topic at hand: changing the install process does not impact
this one bit. If your BIOS has a problem, it has a problem. I have
several machines which multiboot with OpenBSD loaded after 128GB.
Nick.
