On Wednesday 04 June 2003 01:34 pm, collver1@attbi.com wrote:
> Just a quick and unimportant comment:
>
> Under the old default with a small / and a large /usr, it had the
> side-effect of working around BIOS IDE addressing limitations on old PC's.
> The kernel would get placed in / which happened to be near enough to the
> beginning of the disk that it could be bootstrapped.

Actually, I believe that this is not an unimportant comment.  Quite a few 
times in the past I have installed NetBSD on an i386 and edited the 
partitioning on the machine to be different than the default partitions and 
then had the machine not boot.  The way I did get it to boot was to accept at 
least the default size and position for /.   This happened to me as recently 
as a year ago when a friend wanted a new DNS server for the local school 
system and had an old PC ready for the job using NetBSD.  I did a partition 
job that looks like the new layout and the machine didn't boot.  I went back 
to sysinst's original size and content for / and then it booted great.

I don't see this BIOS problem going away for quite a while.  I would assume 
that many new users might say "Let me try NetBSD on this old machine."
Sysinst MUST be able to put a working distribution on these old machines 
without the user having much experience or knowing about the BIOS problems 
that the old machines had with large disks.  I remember spending quite a bit 
of effort on making sure that sysinst made / of the proper size and located 
in the right place for the BIOS addressing limitations of old PCs. 

I do support adding configurations, but there must be a way to get the current
partitioning for older machines.  (Well, at least a default partitioning on 
the older machines that will work with the limits to the BIOS addressing.)

Also, there were several considerations to the size of /var that need to be
addressed.  First, if one wants to save any crash information, it goes in 
/var/crash and that was part of the reason for having / being 2xRAM +
some size so that at least 2 crash dumps could be put on /var/crash without 
running out or disk space.   If /var/crash is smaller than RAM, you can't
save a full crash dump.  Also, I believe that if swap is smaller than RAM you 
can't get a crash dump either.

So it is possible that sysinst should ask a series of questions about the
machine and intended use that dictates a default partitioning.    

I am still convinced that it is still reasonable to have / be a limited size 
file system that does not contain /usr or /home. 

--Phil