On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 10:31:46AM -0700, Don Yuniskis wrote:
> So, when is the "MacOS partition" requirement going to go away?
> Is anyone working on that?  Is it a problem of lack of information?
> Or, just lack of resources (man hours)?

Basically, when someone gets to figuring out how to do this.  It seems
quite possible from the documentation, but it's hard to know what bogons
will be there until it's attempted.  The possible pitfalls that I'm
aware of:

	1. Things may not work as documented (this could be on a per-
	   machine basis; i.e., some machines work one way while others
	   don't work, or work differently).

	2. Things may work differently depending on which disk driver
	   is installed on the boot volume.

	3. It may be difficult to get all of the information that the
	   booter does about the system at boot time.

	4. Early machines may not be in 32-bit mode and will have to be
	   switched, if possible.

	5. Some system patches may be required for some aspects of the
	   hardware to behave well.

Anyway, it would be really nifty if someone could get it working.  I
know at least one person at least started on it, but I don't recall
seeing anything recently (not that I've been paying close attention ;-).
We won't know if any of the above are really an issue until someone
tries it.

> I think the "express" way to *clone* a system is probably dd(1).
> But, I'm not sure how well it would work on *active* filesystems

It wouldn't work well.  If the filesystem is quiescent and just being
read from, you would probably be fine -- you'd just have to fsck the
new filesystem before using it.

-allen

-- 
 Allen Briggs                     briggs@wasabisystems.com
 http://www.wasabisystems.com/    Quality NetBSD CDs, Sales, Support, Service
NetBSD dev. for _your_ Alpha, ARM, M68K, MIPS, PowerPC, SH3, Sparc, x86, etc...