/boot on a separate partition

[Ross Kendall Axe]

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Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> Ross Kendall Axe <ross at axe.homelinux.net> writes:
> 
> 
>>Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>>
>>>At 9:30 PM +0100 7/18/05, Ross Kendall Axe wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>... I want to place the /boot directory in a small 25MB partition
>>>>at the start of the drive.  Setting up the partition with sysinstall
>>>>is easy enough, but does anyone have any suggestions of how to
>>>>diddle the bootloader to accept this configuration?
>>>
>>>
>>>I doubt you can on FreeBSD.  The problem is that the OS would have
>>>to mount both / and /boot before it could do anything, and FreeBSD
>>>doesn't do that.  It assumes the partition that you are loading
>>>from is '/', and uses that to find (for instance) /etc/fstab so
>>>it can find out what the other partitions are.
>>
>>I would have though that putting '/sbin/mount /boot' at the start of the
>>/etc/rc would sort that out.  Surely the contents of /lib, /bin and
>>/sbin are enough to get you that far?
> 
> 
> The kernel has to be loaded *first*.

Yes, by the bootloader, which _can_ read /boot :-)

I think I misunderstood Garance's post.  I took it to mean that given /,
the kernel has no way to find /boot, which seems untrue to me.
Re-reading it, I think he meant that given /boot (which the kernel
assumes is /) it has no way to find the correct /.

Bear in mind that my experience is with Linux, where the location of /
is given on the kernel's command line (or hardcoded into the kernel) and
thus need not be the same partition that holds the kernel.  My
understanding (now) is that FreeBSD assumes that the partition the
kernel was loaded from is /.

Ross

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