Subject: Re: Installation Script
To: None <port-pmax@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
List: port-pmax
Date: 07/18/1997 17:19:47
Philip.Tait@phxase.allied.com (Philip Tait) writes:
>In article <199707180328.NAA14642@lux.sprc.qut.edu.au>,
> gmcgarry@lux.sprc.qut.edu.au (Gregory McGarry) writes:
>> Has anyone started on an installation script for pmax? I am
>> willing to work on it over the weekend. No hardware to hassle
>> me.
>Wouldn't the OpenBSD/pmax installation script be a good start? I don't
>think there are any restrictions on stealing from it.
It would, but I think starting with the ``standard'' NetBSD
installation scripts would be better still. The only reason not to
use them as-is is that they're written to install from a miniroot
running either out of swap or out of a RAMdisk.
Neither option is viable for NetBSD/pmax for a couple of reasons:
(1) Too many PROM versions only boot out of the 'a' partition,
which makes miniroot-in-swap kind of hard;
(2) the standard tools to crunch binaries together into
one statically-linked binary don't work with mips ELF.
I think the required changes to the standard NetBSD install scripts
boil down to *not* trashing and newfs'ing the target root (since we
might be running out of it) and changing the explicit mountpoints
(e.g,. /tmp/ for the newly-installed root) to use a variable.
That variable would be /tmp/ for normal miniroot installs, and the
emtpy string or "/" when we're installing over the currently-running
root.