<1186455409.18708.19.camel at thunk>Bill Sommerfeld writes: > On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 18:57 -0700, Jan Setje-Eilers wrote: > > For the purposes of this project (new boot SPARC), we can avoid this > > problem by not placing editable files into the boot_archive. > > kobj_open() would be modified to read read any files it fails to find > > in the archive (if they exist at all) from the filesystem via the > > firmware. This has the up-side that it keeps all these files from > > invalidating the archive. The down-side is that it's one more place > > the kernel will continue to call into OBP. It's also a SPARC only > > solution. It should however fully address these concerns for the sake > > of this project on SPARC. > > I think this addresses my fears in the short term, though we do need to > see a revised spec which nails down specifics of how files may be > excluded from the archive.
I suspect it should be all editable files as well as all driver.conf files (editable or not) in the archive. I'll gather some data on this and will update the spec accordingly. > > Beyond this project we can investigate more drastic approaches that > > eliminate this issue on all architectures. We could have the > > boot-loader (a modified and extended GRUB on x86 and the bootblock or > > more likely a standalone on SPARC) read all the files that would > > ordinarily make up the archive into memory at the time of boot, and > > then boot that data-structure (which basically contains everything the > > archive contains today). > > ... > > This also sounds like the right answer for the long run; if it would > help make it happen we could derail and issue an opinion with advice > that this approach should be investigated. > Since this project is required for zfs boot I'd rather not slip out any more than we have to, so long as we have a reasonable interim solution, which, it seems, we now have. -jan
