Re: Multiple OpenBSD systems on the same disk

[Ben Goren <ben@trumpetpower.com>]

On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 07:23:24PM -0400, ed@overminder.com wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm trying  to put 2 OpenBSD  systems on my laptop,  sharing the
> unique disk.

The first question that comes  to mind, naturally, is ``why?'' The
only reasons I can think of involve testing and development, and I
wouldn't really do a lot of either on a laptop.

> For sure there's a bug in  the install script, in fact it always
> installboot on  the first A6  partition of  the disk even  if it
> isn't the first partition of  the disk. It should installboot on
> the root of the current A6 partition.

As far as  I'm concerned, it's no bug. OpenBSD is  designed by and
for people  who use  the system,  not those  who play  around with
it. I'd guess that  only a very small minority  of OpenBSD systems
do multiboot, and  that the vast majority of  those have sepearate
hard drives just for that  purpose. (The computer connected to the
keyboard I'm typing on is one such.)

If you really  must have two different versions of  OpenBSD on the
same computer and you can't get  a second hard drive (I'm assuming
that's the  case for a  laptop), then your  best bet will  be some
sort of  intelligent bootloader. I haven't bothered  with such for
years, but there are some recommended bootloaders in the FAQ:

    http://openbsd.trumpetpower.com/faq/faq4.html#Multibooting

Note   that  you'll   probably   have  to   run  installboot   (8)
manually. You'll also  have to  be very  careful when  editing the
disklabel, and  may have  to build  a custom  kernel to  ``boot on
sd1d'' or some such for one of the versions. (BSD systems have one
disklabel per disk, not per DOS partition. If you don't understand
why  or how  this works,  you'll need  to read  a bunch  of manual
pages....)

Cheers,

b&

--
Ben Goren
 mailto:ben@trumpetpower.com
 http://www.trumpetpower.com/
 icbm:33o25'37"N_111o57'32"W

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