From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jan 12 21:40:59 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id VAA06791 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 12 Jan 1996 21:40:59 -0800 (PST) Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [192.216.222.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id VAA06786 for ; Fri, 12 Jan 1996 21:40:50 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id VAA10175 for ; Fri, 12 Jan 1996 21:40:40 -0800 To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Booting from CD..? Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 21:40:39 -0800 Message-ID: <10173.821511639@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk I'm sitting here thinking about how we might make the CD even more useful in the future, and in addition to the usual creature comforts (which I'm also working on) I was wondering about the following pie-in-the-sky ideas: 1. Boot direct from CD. It's my understanding that certain SCSI adapters support this - any clues as to which ones do and how you might go about making them do it? Naturally, we'd also have to figure out some way of getting boot blocks onto a CD. 2. Take advantage of Win95's `autolaunch' on CD insertion to do something clever. Not exactly sure WHAT yet, but it's an idea. I was also talking with Poul-H and Joerg about the idea of getting access to additional command-line args, and how hard that would be. In particular, I'd like to be able to do something like: boot -c aha0=0x330,10;ed0=0x300,10,0xd000 And be able to get at the argv[3] from userconfig, treating this as a `run these commands and leave' sort of op. This would be especially useful from boot-from-{DOS,Windows} mode since you could have a nice little Windows interface for `personalizing' the kernel before booting it and you'd never have to mess with -c directly at all. Thoughts? Jordan