On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, matthew green wrote:

>
>   When NetBSD boots on mfs, all ports stop in single-user mode. Is there a
>   particular reason for it ?

>
>anyway, the issue here is that the these /sbin/init programs have been
>compiled -DSMALL (see distrib/utils/x_init, i believe), and that enables
>a very simple init that doesn't do multi user mode at all (i think).

I have managed to build an md system on a single floppy which boots
multi-user.  I did this early this year when our Novell servers went
belly-up and I thought I'd see if I could make a bootable multi-session
telnet disk.  I managed to build a kernel with 8 virtual consoles (pcvt).
It didn't automatically come up multi-user, although this turned out to
be an advantage, as I needed to log in as root anyway to set the IP address
to that of the PC I was using.  I forget exactly what I had to do to get
everything working, but one thing which did cause problems was that
the getpwXXX() routines in the minimal libc didn't grok encrypted passwords
properly.  AFAIR it didn't know about /etc/master.passwd, but then
I don't expect that anyone has needed encrypted passwords on a floppy
system before.  I can check the details tonight.

AFAIR, my kernel had:
    most ethernet cards
    IDE
    MSDOSFS
    NFS

My impression was that once I'd got rid of sysinst, all the SCSI drivers
and all the EISA drivers there was quite a bit of space to spare (but that
WAS NetBSD 1.4).


Roger

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Roger Brooks (Systems Programmer),          |  Email: R.S.Brooks@liv.ac.uk
Computing Services Dept,                    |  Tel:   +44 151 794 4441
The University of Liverpool,                |  Fax:   +44 151 794 4442
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