Re: /stand and /altroot

[Michael-John Turner <mj%mjturner.net@localhost>]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 03:09:23PM +0100, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:
> My theory is that /altroot could be the mountpoint of an alternate
> root partition (on the same disk or a second one) that can be set up
> and made bootable so that if you accidentally hose / (dd of=/dev/
> wd0a, etc...) you can ask boot(8) to boot from hd1a:netbsd or
> whatever and thus bring your system back up without having to have a
> boot CD to hand, while /stand is something of a distant ancestor of /
> rescue (at least, it seemed to be that way in FreeBSD a few years
> back; standalone meant statically linked).

Yes, FreeBSD used to keep its statically-linked system binaries in /stand,
but I see on my 6.2 system that they're now in rescue. I can't remember if
they ever had /altroot, but it's not present on that selfsame system.

There is a different between 'standalone' (for /stand) and 'rescue', but
seeing as NetBSD doesn't populate /stand (have it ever?), I don't see the
sense in keeping it around.

> Is it worth removing them from hier(7) and base.tgz, which I presume
> is what creates them, in the name of a simpler base system?

Sounds good to me.

-mj
-- 
Michael-John Turner 
mj%mjturner.net@localhost     | http://mjturner.net/