>> It is irregular to not have a disklabel on the netbsd system disk. I >> don't mean wrong, and I don't mean can't work. But it is not normal. >> The more you stray from normal, the greater the likelihood of trouble. > > It also doesn't work in many cases because the fictitious disklabel > doesn't hold all necessary parameters for foreign filesystems > (and for FFS it's guesswork).
This has all changed now thanks you your enhancements on fsck_ext2fs. I am using fictious labels all the way for XEN/PV, XEN/HVM and even bare-metal. As a result I have a working script that automates the installation of netbsd on ext2fs from gnu/linux. There is a strange incompatibility issue between /dev as tmpfs while / is ext2fs. I always got `mtree: .: Invalid argument` when trying to `ls` in there. So I included two passes of MAKEDEV generation, to avoid the use of the tmpfs failover. The first from gnu/linux but it misses proper ownerships (mknod w/o -F -R -r -g -u). The second for ownerships fixup at startup. When doing MAKEDEV at very early stage onto `/etc/rc` I end-up with `Inappropriate ioctl for device`. So I simply put the device file ownership fixup onto `/etc/rc.local`, with a simple lock mechanism to avoid repeating those at boot time every time. I wonder if doing `-u` would be enough. But most importantly I wonder if I SHOULD force a reboot after fixing the device permissions. So much Thanks -- Pierre-Philipp Braun SNE Russia https://os3.su/