Re: Proposal to enhance boot path selections

On Sun, 11 May 2025, Greg Troxel wrote:

> Paul Goyette <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> With the recent changes, specifying /onetbsd will only look for a
>> kernel in /onetbsd and /onetbsd.gz (both being regular files);  it
>> will not look in /onetbsd/kernel or /onetbsd/kernel.gz as might be
>> expected.
>>
>> If one is accustomed to booting with the leading slash it could be
>> disconcerting (or worse) to not having ingrained muscle-memory boot
>> the old kernel as expected.
>
> My $0.02 is that I had no idea that 'boot foo' would try to load
> foo/kernel, and that I find this unintuitive and not really helpful.
>
> Reading boot(8) on current amd64, I see that boot is specified to take
> "filename" and there is no mention of directories.  The man page kind of
> implies that filename must be the name of a file in the root directory.
> There's no suggestion that it makes sense to have leading slash.
> There's no suggestion that one can give a pathname rather than a
> filename.
>
> Thus I suspect I am missing something.

Yup, I think you're missing the fact that all of this relates to the
ratther new-ish KERNEL_DIR option, support for which was only recently
completed (by myself).  KERNEL_DIR is described briefly in options(4),
and it is noted in both CHANGES and UPDATING.

In short, KERNEL_DIR provides a mechanism to keep a kernel and its
associated modules together, addressing one of the most common
complaints about modules.

Sorry for not making this more clear.


+---------------------+--------------------------+----------------------+
| Paul Goyette (.sig) | PGP Key fingerprint:     | E-mail addresses:    |
| (Retired)           | 1B11 1849 721C 56C8 F63A | [email protected]    |
| Software Developer  | 6E2E 05FD 15CE 9F2D 5102 | [email protected]  |
| & Network Engineer  |                          | [email protected] |
+---------------------+--------------------------+----------------------+