On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Bob Nestor wrote:

> Bill Studenmund wrote:
> 
> This is basically what I did in sysinst.  It builds a new Apple Partition 
> Map and writes it to disk. In my previous version I made a small kernel 
> mod to allow the in-core disk partition to be reconstructed from the 
> on-disk Apple Partition Map by re-reading and processing the map again.  
> This insured the on-disk and in-core were in sync.  But given the 
> widespread objects to this I went back and built my own version of the 
> in-core label which I attempted to force into use via the ioctl.  That's 
> when I discovered the path the kernel code took that basically ignored my 
> new in-core label in the very routine I wanted to modify in my earlier 
> attempt to get sysinst running. ;-)

Do you still have code to re-read the disklabel?

> >Scott, weren't you going to make a new ioctl to do that?
> 
> This was also my understanding that with a new MI approach to the 
> disklabel we would have a new ioctl to re-read in the on-disk label into 
> the in-core one.  Basically that's the only remaining hold-up for having 
> a functional sysinst for the mac68k port.

Cool. Let's get this done soon.

I'm in the process of getting installboot on the macppc to play nice with
an existing Apple Partition Map, so that we can get 1.5 to coexist nicely
with other OS's. :-)

> There is one other minor problem. Sysinst creates new FFS file systems 
> which are incompatible with the old Installer and semi-incompatible with 
> the current Booter.  It's not a major problem if one never has to go back 
> and use the Installer.  The Booter is a slighlty different problem, but 
> since sysinst forces the creation of a separate root and usr the root 
> tends to be small enough that the Booter almost always succeeds.

Can we get sysinst to just build an old-style filesystem? We still have
the code to do it in newfs.

Take care,

Bill