You may also want to have a look at GAG.
I use it to dualboot OpenBSD and Windows. Not sure if it will work with
two OpenBSD's or not but it's very fast and easy to use.
Even booting it just off the floppy disk is super fast! I will be
looking at having a -current and -stable box when I have some time.
The GAG page:
http://gag.sourceforge.net/
Chris Bennett
Leo Baltus wrote:
Op 21/05/2008 om 01:10:05 +0300, schreef Imre Oolberg :
Some time ago i did experiment with dual-booting (actually
multi-booting) from one harddisk several OpenBSD instances, for the sake
of fun. I settled to using dualboot OpenBSD to make upgrades more
suitable for me (just unpacking new distribution's file sets under /mnt
mounted empty partition and rebooting).
Right, that's what I am aiming at.
But as i see it there is to ways of having multiple root i.e. a
partitions on one physical harddisk
1. Use only one fdisk partition and in it one OpenBSD root is normal a
partition and another is in the same disklabel, say g. And so for
example in this disklabel a, d, e, f partitions belong to one instance
and g is another (consisting of one filesystem). Two instances share
only swap partition.
To select between them you need to say at boot> prompt
boot> boot hd0a:/bsd
or
boot> boot hd0g:/bsd
2. Use severaly fdisk partitions, each has its own disklabel and this
disklabel is dedicated to one OpenBSD instance. OpenBSD bootloader is on
To select between instances you need to use grub bootloader from binary
packages
# pkg_add grub
Ah, good OLD grub to the rescue. Thanks, I was staring at openbsd's
boot, but it doesn't seem to have the configurability that e.g. grub
has.
It goes like this that grub's first stage is in the harddisk's MBR and
openbsd bootloader's first stage is installed into each fdisk partition,
i.e. you use chainloading.
See also
/usr/local/share/doc/grub/README.OpenBSD
/usr/local/share/examples/grub/menu.lst
Essential is to understand that OpenBSD uses first fdisk's OpenBSD A6
disklabel it sees. Thats why grub fiddles with them.
I am now totally confused about openbsd disk device naming schema.
As I now see it /dev/wd0a refers tho the first ide disk with id 6B
(OpenBSD), label a. As it is the one elected by boot to be the rootfs.
It would make more sense to me to have en naming schema, which refers to
wd$idedisk$partition$label
Now, how can I mount, let's say, the fourth partition, on which I only
want menu.lst to reside on. this can bee a tiny filesystem, with no OS.
So I can
mkfs /dev/$whatever
mount /dev/$whatever /grub
cp /usr/local/share/examples/grub/menu.lst /grub
and move on.
Leo Baltus wrote:
I would like to have more than one openbsd root filesystem on my
hardrive. Could somebody please explain how to go about this?
In a linux environment I could set up 2 lv's and point to each of them
by kernel commandlines.
Using openbsd I could use multiple bios-partitions each having an a: label
but how do I tel the bootloader to use a specific partition?
Maybe there is a way I didn't think of, please let me know.
