Another possibility occurred to me that would be similar to modifying bootparams but more broadly compatible and applicable would be to use directory services via nsswitch for fstab like Darwin, and then support binding to a directory server during boot.
It also looks like at least some of the other get*ent(3) functions could be updated to route through nsswitch, so they at least have the option of being supplied via a directory service too. (Darwin-based platforms effectively always use a local directory service that can both go to the files and be bound to a remote directory service.) It also looks like some of the things that do go through nsswitch seem to statically specify which sources are allowed rather than just use whatever's specified. Or maybe I'm misreading and it's just the default source list that's being specified for them, I'm new to this code... -- Chris
