On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 05:16:24PM -0500, Josh Grosse wrote: > On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 09:43:44PM +0100, frantisek holop wrote: > > hi there, > > > > 4.0 is here so time for my second annual reinstall on my notebook. > > i have come to the conclusion that it would be nice to have a > > "production" system and a "development" system. i need a stable > > system to work with (stable packages i don't have to manually > > compile, etc, etc.) on the dev system i'd like to track current. > > With MBR-partitioned architectures (i386 et. al), you can have only one > OpenBSD > MBR partition at a time. If you want multiple MBR partitions, a partition > manager (such as ranish) can let you swap one "live" A6 partition for another. > > An easier way is to use disklabel level partitioning. By default, the > root partition is "a" but you can easily boot with a different root partition > through using the "-a" option. > > I started out with the multiple MBRs via a partition manager, but switched > fairly quickly to disklabels instead. This had several advantages: shared > swap, shared /home, and sometimes shared /var, depending, and I found it very > easy to work on the test environment while production was running, just by > using a chrooted shell. I could run my production /etc in test, and only > change fstab. >
You should be able to have up to four primary partitions, each with a different OpenBSD installation and associated disklabel. The one you want to use you make an 'A6' (OpenBSD) partition. The others you make some other kind. The 'A6' partition will be spoofed as 'a' and the disklabel read from its first sector. When you want to use another partition you make that the only 'A6' partition. Up to you if you want the disklabel's in each partition to 'know' about the other partitions. Of course this involves running fdisk every time you want to switch, and gives you a lot of rope ... Completely untested theoretical musings. .... Ken
