Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2004 14:04:34 +1030 From: "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> To: gkshenaut@ucdavis.edu, Greg Shenaut <greg@bogslab.ucdavis.edu>, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x Message-ID: <200401091404.34083.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> In-Reply-To: <200401082334.i08NYMx86020@thistle.bogs.org> References: <200401082334.i08NYMx86020@thistle.bogs.org>
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On Friday 09 January 2004 10:04, Greg Shenaut wrote: > In nuntio <20040108163724.GA26745@lpthe.jussieu.fr>, Michel TALON divulgat: > >By the way, what's the reason that it is impossible to have just one > >floppy which boots FreeBSD kernel, allows to see an unbootable cdrom > >and continue installation from here? > > I agree. The boot floppy tries to do w a y too much. I think we > should think of the boot floppy as way to implement an old-style > console emulator: it "boots" and you tell it where to read the > *real* boot image from. It should support all of the usual sources: > CDs/DVDs, NFS mounts, FTP, and so on. *How* does it support all of those sources? CD/DVD drives need drivers (ATA optimisticly, but quite possibly SCSI), FTP/NFS need network card support, NFS needs nfsclient.ko ie this is the exact problem it has now :) You could save a little space with your idea because you wouldn't need sysinstall which is admittedly quite large, but it wouldn't address the fundamental issue. If you want floppy installs you need a way of putting arbitary drivers onto floppy disks easily so users can grab what they need and use it instead of having to second guess what sort of hardware they are likely to be using. IMHO of course 8-) -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 9A8C 569F 685A D928 5140 AE4B 319B 41F4 5D17 FDD5
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