In article <[email protected]>, Andreas Gustafsson <[email protected]> wrote: >Hi all, > >Since jmcneill's commit of src/lib/libutil/getfsspecname.c 1.5, NetBSD >supports the special string "ROOT." as an alias for the root device in >/etc/fstab. This can be used to avoid hard-coding the device name of >the root disk on bootable disk images, allowing a single image to be >booted from disks having different device names. > >This feature is currently used by the ARM images, but not by the >images for other architectures. I would like to change this. My >immediate motivation for this is to fix PR 51503, "7.0.1/amd64 USB >install image root mount fails when sd present", but I belive it would >also be useful on live images as well as install images, and on >other architectures. Note that I am not proposing changing the fstab >that gets written to the target disk when installing a system using >sysinst, only that of pre-built disk images such as those from >"build.sh install-image" or "build.sh live-image". > >The question is, is there any reason to keep the existing machinery >for specifying a fixed device name via the BOOTDISK make variable? >Or in other words, can anyone think of an architecture or type of disk >image where the "ROOT." reference might not work, or where a >hard-coded root disk device in /etc/fstab might otherwise be >desirable? > >If not, the change I'm proposing would basically amount to changing >"/dev/@@BOOTDISK@@" to "ROOT." in src/distrib/common/bootimage/fstab.in >and fstab.install.in, followed by a bunch of cleanup work to remove >things that are no longer used or needed, such as all references to >BOOTDISK in the Makefiles. > >The "build.sh live-image" target currently builds two live images each >for i386 and amd64, with names containing "-wd0root" and "-sd0root", >respectively. With the proposed change, these would become almost >identical, differing only in size and the OMIT_SWAPIMG setting, and >probably ought to be merged into one. Other architectures only have >at most a single live image each, but their names also contain strings >like "-sd0root" or "-ra0root" that would now be meaningless and should >be removed. > >Comments? Objections?
I think this is a good idea! christos
