On Tue, 19 Jun 2007 06:44:37 -0400
"Jared D. McNeill" <jmcneill@invisible.ca> wrote:

> On 19-Jun-07, at 3:09 AM, Pavel Cahyna wrote:
> > And I hope the answer is "no", because "yes" would mean that in some
> > cases, you would have to boot the system, edit the configuration >
> > file, and reboot, which is really inconvenient. Especially because
> > changing the configuration can be a prerequisite for successfull
> > boot. The exact format of the configuration file does not matter
> > here.
> 
> My latest patch, which I'll make available later today, addresses
> this for the current implementation.
> 
> The bootloader pulls in /netbsd.plist, has the ability to read/write
> the dictionary itself, then the (potentially updated) plist is passed
> to the kernel. If you happened to have done 'boot -c', any changes
> made in userconf are reflected in the bootprops dictionary.
> 
> If you like what you see, you can run 'bootprops dump >/netbsd.plist'
> to capture the current state. No need to reboot because you're
> already running the way you want.
> 
What do you mean by "write" the dictionary?  Writing to the file
system?  I assume not, given your last paragraph -- and that would be
the correct decision.  The boot loader should *not* do anything like
that.



		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb