Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 13:31:39 -0500 (EST) From: Dan Janowski <danj@3skel.com> To: "Eric L. Hernes" <erich@lodgenet.com> Cc: Peter Childs <pjchilds@imforei.apana.org.au>, grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey), freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: cdrom boot? Message-ID: <199611191831.NAA14481@fnur.3skel.com> In-Reply-To: <199611191654.KAA04299@jake.lodgenet.com> References: <199611191437.BAA08195@al.imforei.apana.org.au> <199611191654.KAA04299@jake.lodgenet.com>
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Eric L. Hernes writes: > > The gist of that thread was that the El-Torito spec was done in > the true pc-hardware style.. a pile of crap. It provides several > ways of making a CD bootable, ranging from `total hackery' to `the > right way'. Now doesn't that sound familiar wrt specs? ;-) > I've wondered about this myself. The problem is with the PC architecture, really, as suggested. Maybe the way to go about it is to get us part of the way there. Have a floppy image that can reliably boot strap the CDROM; something really minimal. The problem with this is, it would require a major reworking of the system loading architecture. Are there any commecial UNIXs that you can load via PPP, Slip, NFS, LAN or WAN... None that I am aware of. The commercial UNIX world has a very, very limited loading procedure, tape or CDROM. Even then, if it is a Sun, SGI, or HP, they have boot proms that make everything easier, even bootp/tftp booting. We don't exist in the same world. FreeBSD gives people more choice and flexibility, but we pay the price of wanting simplicity. I would love to ditch release.[48], it would make customizing the boot/load process much easier. JKH has been threatening a total re-write, but I haven't heard anything about it. This issue really has to be addressed in the larger picture. We could stand a major revamping of fdisk/label for disks as well as booting and system loading, and booting from CDROMs is included. It's just not a standalone problem. Dan -- danj@3skel.com Dan Janowski Triskelion Systems, Inc. Bronx, NY
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