Re: [coLinux-devel] wish list

[Jaroslaw K. <ja...@zd...>]

Dual booting is possible today using the LABEL feature that most distros
supports (fedora being one of them):

It works like this:

1. Mount has a special syntax that lets you specify device labels instead of
real device names. Labels are parts of filesystems (ext2,ext3, probably
others too).

Assuming your /dev/hda1 has a label "XXX" you can mount it using either

mount /dev/hda1 mountpoint
mount LABEL=XXX mountpoint

2. Same syntax can be used in /etc/fstab:

-----------------------
LABEL=XXX / ext2 defaults 0 0
-----------------------
can be used instead of:
-----------------------
/dev/hda1 / ext2 defaults 0 0
-----------------------

3. With the introduction of 2.6 kernel colinux supports "/proc/partitions"
which is required for LABELs to work. Previous version had a problem where
/proc/partitions didn't contain cobdX devices so "mount" didn't know what to
scan for labels.

4. In theory it should be possible to even pass root=LABEL=XXX to kernel at
boot time (this requires initrd), but I was never able to do it.

5. Labels can be assigned using "e2label" utility. For other FSs there
should be appropriate utilities.

So assuming you assign all your devices the appropriate labels (this isn't
possible for SWAP partitions, afaik) and modify the appropriate /etc/fstab
entries, you should have a clean dual-bootable linux distro.

I use it daily, and have no problems with this setup.

Jarek
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dan Aloni" <da...@co...>
To: "Sarah Tanembaum" <sar...@ya...>
Cc: <col...@li...>
Sent: Saturday, July 03, 2004 3:48 PM
Subject: Re: [coLinux-devel] wish list


> On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 01:49:01PM -0400, Sarah Tanembaum wrote:
> > Perhaps you coLinux guru can help me out for the following:
> >
> > Suppose that I have dual boot machine, Windows(partition1) and
> > Linux(partition2). I know that I can convert the Linux installation to
work
> > with coLinux within Windows, but with many things to alter such as the
fstab
> > entry(change the /dev/hd??,/dev/sd??,etc to /dev/cobd? or /dev/cobd/?
and
> > disable loading modules of some devices such as USB, etc ...(dunno how
yet).
>
> You don't actually need to disable module loading, but rather put the
right
> modules for the running coLinux kernel under the /lib/modules directory.
>
> > My question is that is it possible that coLinux do the automatic
> > reconfiguration for such environment e,g:
>
> The next snapshot version of coLinux will include device node aliasing,
> which means that you can configure any cobd to appear as a hd or sda
> partition, and even boot from it (e.g. root=/dev/hda4). Theoretically it
> would be possible to probe the Linux partitions in the Windows side and
> create a proper configuration file. This way you don't need to change
> /ect/fstab.
>
> -- 
> Dan Aloni
> da...@co...
>
>
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