Why are so many people lining up to die on the "One big root partition"
hill? Partition your disks for fuck's sake, or if you are too lazy to
do that, just let the installer do it for you. And, no, it doesn't
"just work", it doesn't, it just hasn't broken yet.
Also, both install.i386 and install.amd64 call out the fact that your
system might break if your kernel happens to be beyond the point your
system's BIOS can no longer read. From install.i386:
``
The OpenBSD root partition must reside completely within the BIOS
supported part of the hard disk -- this could typically be 504MB, 2GB,
8GB or 128GB, depending upon the age of the machine and its BIOS. The
rest of the OpenBSD partitions can be anywhere that hardware supports.
''
Beside, that limitation isn't anything any of can deal with, its an
inherent problem in how various manufacturers implemented their BIOSes
IF you are dead set on such a foolish partition layout, then go bug
your motherboard manufacturer to completely rewrite their BIOS to
support doing so. And since this is a restriction in the way the BIOS
works, there is no way it would work in i386 if it doesn't in amd64.
The only way it would works is if in your futzing about with bootloaders
and kernels you accidentally fixed it by moving the kernel somewhere the
BIOS can read it (in which case either boot loader would be able to read
it).
On 10/25/2018 2:14 PM, diego righi wrote:
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...
