On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 09:43:44PM +0100, frantisek holop wrote: > hi there, > > 4.0 is here so time for my second annual reinstall on my notebook. > i have come to the conclusion that it would be nice to have a > "production" system and a "development" system. i need a stable > system to work with (stable packages i don't have to manually > compile, etc, etc.) on the dev system i'd like to track current. > > but. because i have only one notebook, these system should be on > the same physical harddisk. > > the only recent thread i have seen is about dual booting with netbsd: > http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=110575764931297&w=2 > > i am not an mbr/disklabel guru, but it seems to me that it all comes > down to disklabel becasue i can have 4 primary partitions, but if i > interpret it correctly, i can't have seperate 'a' and 'b' (and so on) > for all of these primary partitions, now can i? > > would it make sense to make every primary partition into an isolated > seperate disklabel entity? i know this wouldn't be a trivial change > of course, but is it possible at all? > > > or should i just go with virtualization? > is it in that state already that i can? > > or any other ideas to have 2 systems on one? :)
Wait for my article for gory details of MBR... Anyway of all options suggested I like the multiple separate fdisk partitions approach. Much cleaner and easier to maintain in the long run never mind if it has minor disadvantages... Actually there are none. Let me explain. OpenBSD does not come with a boot manager unless I am mistaken. And only one of the four fdisk primary partition can be marked active or bootable. Theoretically at least it seems possible that you can install upto four separate OpenBSD instances on a single hard disk, one on each fdisk partition. Now, how do you select which partition to boot? You need a boot manager. You can go with grub or something else installed into a third fdisk partition in your case. Say you install FreeBSD or linux. Now let us come to disklablels. Only a,b and c partitions are special. b is swap and let us not worry about it, you can even use a temporary file for swapping. a is root partition and hence most critical. You can use one of d-i parititions to point to root partition in the second OpenBSD fdisk install. Just set it in fstab. Try this with read only mount of root file system. Just figure out the boot loader options. I think it should be pretty straight forward. Of course you can share /home. Don't share too many partitions und you will have things interfering with one another in a manner you don't anticipate. Best of luck! Does this make sense? regards, Girish -- Linux is for folks who hate Windoze. FreeBSD is for folks who love UNIX. OpenBSD is for folks who can't live without UNIX.
