I'm playing around with installing a number of freebsd releases on the same PC, and something came up which makes me a little uneasy. I understand why I am seeing what I'm seeing, I'm just uneasy about what it might mean for people who will pick up 5.0-release and start testing it on their own machines.
I have 4.6.2-release, 4.7-release, and 5.0-dp2-release on a single PC. After some bouncing between versions, and an occasional 'disklabel' command, I seem to have the partitions for 4.6.2 in an odd state. Both 4.7 and 5.0-dp2 have no problem mounting them, but if I try to boot up the 4.6.2 system it fails because 4.6.2 finds that "values in super block disagree with those in first alternate". 4.6.2 wants me to 'fsck' the partitions manually, but I *think* I remember that using the older fsck might cause trouble. For my own PC none of this is critical, because I'm just doing a few quick tests and at this point I don't even need to boot up 4.6.2. I just wonder how much of an issue this will be for people who setup their machines to dual-boot between 5.0-release (once it *is* released) and "something a little older". 4.7 has no trouble, but even 4.6.2 (which is not all that old) can be confused by the subtle changes in UFS which will show up in 5.0-release. I am not suggesting we must do something about this, I'm just a little uneasy about the situation. Okay, well maybe I should try at least one suggestion. Should we tell people that they *must* update 'fsck' on *other* (multi-boot) systems before installing 5.0-release? -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
