So let's say I'm a fool, I use a foolish partition layout, and the intel x86
and amd64 architectures are tricky/shitty architectures with stupid bioses
which work bad, ok?
So why openbsd 6.4 i386 and amd64 bootloaders (not biosboot, boot!)
express different behavior? Wasn't openbsd about correctness? :/
If I'm wrong and it is documented that I can't do this fine, but so also
i386 should not work, this behavior is just strange for me, that's it.
On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 4:29 AM Misc User <open...@leviathanresearch.net> wrote:
>
> 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 <dera...@openbsd.org> wrote:
> >> diego righi <diego.ri...@gmail.com> 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...
>
