I have a paticularlly painful change that all current users
must undergo soon

As you know we are using the new std scsi code now.  This code is shared
among many ports (or will be).  As a result there must be certain
things that are standard.  One is the encoding of disk unit numbers 
in their respective char/block special files.  The approach chosen
(for all ports) was this:

diskminor	[ unit | partition ]
specifically

disk hardware unit = minor / MAXPARTITIONS
disk partition = minor % MAXPARTITIONS

Unfortunately while it is much cleaner method is its not our current
one.  I mean to make it that way soon.

What this means is that:

1) The current rootfs image will no longer work
2) Your current dev directory will become invalid (regarding sd devices)

The reason this is painful is that you will need to update your
/dev/[r]sd* entries including the one in which you use to mount '/'

You can boot the system  however when you go to mount '/' read/write
so that you can update your dev dir it will not work (do to an invalid
special file)

Therefor you must update your dev directory before rebooting to the new 
kernel.  If you have bffs I suppose this will all be easy, however
if you do not you must be very careful.  Once you make the change 
you will not be able to run older kernels.

If worse came to worse you could always get BFFS and repair things.

Anyway when I make the change I will update MAKEDEV so what you should
be able to do is install the new kernel (not booting it yet)
run MAKEDEV and then reboot.

I wanted to give everyone a few days to prepare for this..
I will put another note up when I actually commit the change.

BTW if you want some more reasons, I need the next binary distribution
to also have a new rootfs image the old one is too out of date now.
This is te most logical time to make the change obviously.

One has to pay for running the cutting edge I guess. (perhaps certain
people even enjoy things like this :)

Chris.

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