On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Robert Elz wrote:

> I'm going to reply to all the messages on this in one message:
>
> [...lots of stuff no point in quoting it all...]

Thats a very thorough argument :)

Obviously your needs are a little different than most peoples.  For most
people, I'd would think having one NetBSD disklabel would be preferable.
If there isn't already some way to tell NetBSD to use whatever filesystem
the kernel was loaded from as its root, then I think that should be added.
I agree that having to compile in the root partition sucks.  I just
assumed that "root on ?" use the filesystem the kernel was loded from, not
the 'a' partition of the disk the kernel was loaded from.

Of course, if you really want strong seperation like that it would be much
better to use completely seperate drives.  Having them on seperate drives
makes it even more unlikely that one system would accidentially corrupt
the other.  Infact, that is exactly how I do upgrades in a production
environment.  I install the newer version of NetBSD on a second drive (or
sometimes a completly seperate machine), configure it and test it as much
as possible, and then swap the SCSI IDs and reboot.

But in the event that a second drive is not an option, AND you want to
achieve as much seperation as possible then I agree your proposal sounds
good.  I just think its important that people consider the two other
options first as they are (IMHO) less confusing, not platform specific,
and already work (with the possible exception of the kernel chosing the
correct root filesystem without compiling it in).

Rick