STABLE & CURRENT on same machine?

[Dan Strick]

>>>
> I suddenly find myself with a need to use something thta seems to only be
> supported in 5.1 CURRENT. I've never visited 5.x land before, and I'm a bit
> warry.
>
> I've got a Compaq N410C that's pretty happy in 4 STABLE land, and has a
> Linux partition. I'm considering blowing away the Linux partition, and
> replaceing it with 5.1 CURRENT.
>
> Any issues (loader etc all) I should know about here?
>>>

If you use the standard FreeBSD MBR bootstrap program, boot0, and you
configure it with the "noupdate" option (an uncommon configuration) and
you have two bootable FreeBSD slices on that disk, then you can boot only
one of them without editing the MBR slice table.  (Whichever one is the
"active" slice or the first one if neither is active.)  This is due to a
limitation in the bootstrap design.  (There is apparently no convention
by which the boot0 program can pass the booted slice number to the boot1
program.)

Dan Strick
strick at covad.net