boot2 broken ? (booting from pst fails)

[John Baldwin]

On 14-Apr-2003 Toerless Eckert wrote:
>> > With boot2 being space challenged, why does it need to be a btx
>> > client anyhow ?
>> 
>> Because then the code to read UFS can be in C instead of assembly. :)  Are
>> you offering to rewrite the entire bootstrap in assembly and maintain it?
> 
> No, i was rather thinking about the good ol' mechanism of burning the sectors
> for "loaders" into the boot1/boot2 bootstrap code, foregoing the need
> to put UFS into boot2 and allowing it to be a simple real-mode loader.

The idea of burning the sectors into the bootstrap is very _very_ unacceptable.
As you pointed out, FreeBSD does try to avoid dirty hacks like this for the
sake of a cleaner and more flexible design.  Hardcoding the sectors would make
things like booting kernels directly from boot2 as well as booting
/boot/loader.old in the case that /boot/loader breaks impossible.  Also, apart
from your hardware, FreeBSD is quite compatible with the large majority of
PC hardware.  We boot directly off of 3ware ATA RAID controllers where I
work, so I really think your claims are rather overstated.

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/