Active slice, only for a next boot

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2011-May-30 17:42:39 +0000, Dieter BSD <dieterbsd at engineer.com> wrote:
>A better approach is to be able to boot whatever slice you
>want without having to change the active slice.
>
>NetBSD can do this.  The MBR puts up a menu of the bootable
>slices on the disk being booted.  You can allow the timer
>to time out and boot the default.  Or you can enter the number
>of the slice you want to boot.  Or you can type a function key
>F1 F2 ... to boot a different disk, and it will load the MBR
>from that disk and run it.  There is an alternative for keyboards
>without function keys.

So can FreeBSD - though only for MBR - this functionality doesn't seem
to have made it into the GPT bootcode.

>And it works great.  Except that one of the 27 stages of boot
>code that FreeBSD uses INSISTS on booting the active slice,
>so you can tell the MBR to boot slice 3 and slice 3's boot
>code sees that slice 4 is active and boots slice 4.

Multibooting worked correctly when I last used it (a few years ago).
Have you raised this as a PR?

>RS-232 console + hardware modem + POTS = remote console

And even that doesn't fully work unless you have a serial-aware BIOS.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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