On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 07:52:30PM -0800, Joseph Alten wrote: > Due to technical constraints, my setup requires that I have a separate > boot partition (basically the kernel and anything else critical for > booting), and then of course my root partition other data partitions on a > separate disk. > > I'm kind of new to OpenBSD, and so far what I've managed to do is copy > /bsd to a separate partition, then at the boot> prompt I run "boot hd0a > -a", then specify my root partition when prompted by the kernel. While > this has the desired effect, I'd rather not run this every time I want to > boot OpenBSD. Is there a kernel parameter I can pass that lets the kernel > know ahead of time the root device I wish to mount? > > Basically I'm looking for the OpenBSD equivalent of root=/dev/xxx Linux > kernel parameter. I think I managed to get FreeBSD working similarly with > the vfs.root.mountfrom= parameter, but this doesn't appear to exist in > OpenBSD. >
How large can your boot partition be? The whole root partition of OpenBSD (ie. not /home, /usr, or /var) isn't that big. I just checked through Absolute OpenBSD but I don't see a way of booting a kernel on a different filesystem than the root. However, it may be there in kernel config, check the man page. Doug.
