Date: Fri, 06 Nov 1998 12:26:36 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Robert Nordier <rnordier@nordier.com>, chuckr@mat.net (Chuck Robey), mike@smith.net.au, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ficl Message-ID: <199811062026.MAA00622@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 06 Nov 1998 11:47:09 PST." <3051.910381629@time.cdrom.com>
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> > Devices: Apart from video and serial consoles, disk and net devices > > are currently provided for. Though, at least on the i386, it should > > be reasonably easy to add access to anything that has BIOS or other > > firmware support. > > Hmmm. CDs must be a bitch, however, since they're not mapped into the > BIOS drive list. Do you support talking to them outside of the El > Torrito bios hack? There's no CD support on the i386 at the moment, and not likely to be for some time; we'd have to grow an ATAPI driver and probably drivers for the Adaptec and NCR SCSI BIOS interfaces too. > I'm not really sure what you mean by "net devices" > either - how does one configure and use a typical NIC from the BTX > environment? BTX has nothing to do with it. Again, there's no low-level NIC support in the i386 code at the moment, but basically you provide a low-level hardware driver, and then the IP stack in lib stand does the Bootp Thing. From there, it's just another device, eg. 'load net:/kernel' will do "what you expect it to do". > > Filesystems: cd9960, dosfs, nfs, and ufs; as well as zipfs and > > tftp. Adding read-only support for a local filesystem needs ~700 > > lines of C at the moment. > > Could you perhaps say a few words on the filename space issues around > this? > > Let's say I have the following scenario: I've booted the loader off a > floppy on a system which also has 2 hard drives, one of which has a > DOS file system on it and a FreeBSD partition, the other being devoted > solely to FreeBSD. I also have a SCSI CDROM and a PCI network adaptor > (call it a DECchip NIC, just for arguments sake) in the machine. > In this environment, what exactly are my options? I know I can > open /foo/bar in order to grab /foo/bar off the floppy, but what > about the DOS partition? The FreeBSD root filesystem? An NFS or > TFTP host? Questions questions! :-) If we assume that the first disk is all DOS, and the second is half DOS and half FreeBSD, you'll have devices like this: disk0: Floppy. disk1s1: DOS partition on first disk. disk2s1: DOS partition on second disk. disk2s2a: FreeBSD root filesystem. ... net: Root of TFTP space on TFTP server or NFS mount. I'm not optomistic about CDROMs in the short term; there's a *lot* of work there. It's possible that we can use the Forth support to write loadable BIOS interface routines, which will keep code size down. The "which network filesystem do you use" issue is unsubtle; the code will simply run down the list of filesystems, passing them the pathname until it succeeds or falls off the end. This means that ordering is significant. There's room for improvement here, but one thing at a time. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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