Quote:
Originally Posted by bsd-keith
From what I can remember, it used to be advised to put all BSDs first before Linux, because of a disk size limit for booting...
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On amd64 and i386, the OpenBSD two-stage bootloader uses BIOS services to load the kernel into memory. The kernel location on disk must be addressable by the BIOS. The specific limitation varies, depending on the individual BIOS implementation and the disk technology being used.
While no longer an issue with modern BIOS and disk drive technologies, one never really knew the address limit without actually testing it. As I recall, the limit could range from as little as 528MB upward into a wide variety of GB limits.
One of the benefits of having a small root directory was to avoid discovering the limit after updating or upgrading, and having a new kernel with sectors outside the BIOS addressing limit.
But with more modern hardware, this is much less of a concern and the "large drive" considerations that discussed the BIOS limit were removed from the FAQ.