So now I try to reply, I don't want to sound like a troll, because I'm an openbsd user and supporter since very long time and I know that with a proper bug report the full dmesg should be provided and possibly even more... ...but to keep things short I've this ECS GF8100VM-M5 motherboard that I use sometimes on a home bench to test things around, disks, adapters, and so on... ...a lab machine let's say, with a toshiba 160Gb disk attached and 2Gb of ram, and one big "a" slice that was working fine with openbsd 6.3 amd64, after updating to openbsd 6.4 amd64 it started to reboot as soon as "boot" took over, I could see nor log anything, this is why I was not yet submitting a bugreport, so I started to think about an hardware problem, but then I've retried with openbsd 6.3 amd64 and everything was working, so I've tried with openbsd 6.4 i386 and it was also working fine, retried with openbsd 6.4 amd64 and bam, it was flipping a reboot immediately no error, nothing, so since I have many spare disks to experiment I've installed and booted openbsd 6.4 i386 on a spare disk, booted it as first sata disk with the openbsd 6.4 amd64 disk as second sata disk, mounted it on /mnt, copied the files /usr/mdec/biosboot and /usr/mdec/biosboot in /mnt/usr/mdec/ and installed the bootloader with this command: installboot -r /mnt sd1 /usr/mdec/biosboot /usr/mdec/boot as soon as I rebooted, openbsd amd64 booted fine with the i386 bootloader. Now I'm not a programmer but the versions of the 2 "boot" differs: i386 states 3.34 whereas amd64 states 3.41 I don't know if it's only cosmetic, and then they do the same inside the code, but the version difference is confirmed in the cvs: http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/arch/i386/stand/boot/conf.c?rev=1.65&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/arch/amd64/stand/boot/conf.c?rev=1.42&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup (again I'm sorry for the poor report, and if I will get the famous "you suck" reply I will understand =_)
As for the FAQ and the man pages, I've actually read the man pages of installboot and boot and fdisk and many others since I started using openbsd from the 2.6 release, I don't remember it was written that it can't boot from a big "a" slice, but maybe it's my mistake and I didn't find it, I totally *love* openbsd man pages and they are the best of any other unix I've tried! On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 10:09 PM Theo de Raadt <[email protected]> wrote: > > diego righi <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Big "a" slice may not be advised and not secure for production, but it > > always worked. > > Do you have evidence? > > > (and on i386 it still works, even on amd64 with the i386 bootloader) > > Evidence supplied? > > BTW, the i386 and amd64 bootloaders are largely identical. You better > have evidence. > > > So I agree that it is not good practice but to quick test machines I've did > > it many times. > > Quick? It takes extra steps at install time. It is slower to set it up that > way. > > > (and never found in the FAQ nor in the manpages that it should not work) > > Nowhere is it promised that the FAQ is incomplete, actually the FAQ > recommends in strong terms to use the default setup. The manpages > do not propose such decisions, but I doubt you read man pages about > this and are simply making that part up...
