On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 12:20:57 +0200, Anthony Mallet wrote: > On Wednesday 16 Sep 2020, at 12:09, Martin Husemann wrote: > > This works fine on e.g. sparc*; I can do: shutdown -b netbsd.t -r > > now > > > > No state is modified on any disks, very convenient. > > Right, not changing any state seems safer! > > > I don't know if there is enough of a persistent environment for UEFI > > boots (I would guess there is), and probably no easy way for BIOS > > boot. > > The machine in question is not UEFI, so I would be more interested in > a pure BIOS solution.
As der Mouse mentioned upthread, kloader(4) would seem like a promising candidate to implement this. It doesn't support x86 currently, but existing kloader_machdep.c files are minuscule - the non-boilerplate code is essentially just one function that is essentially a bit more than a fancy memcpy. The realy interesting question is if NetBSD on a given platform leaves the machine in a state that a newly booted kernel expects the machine to be in. The hpc* ports that support kloader do not expect anything much from the initial state of the machine. Of course that doesn't suit your immediate needs... -uwe