Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 19:51:11 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: boot disk.... Message-ID: <199510300921.TAA01368@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199510300812.JAA04793@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at Oct 30, 95 09:12:08 am
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J Wunsch stands accused of saying: > > It's more that this much work be put in to maintain compatability with > > the existing scheme. If I Were To Have My Way (tm), I'd have another > > partition in the FreeBSD slice for holding kernels and bootstrap tools, > > stuck at the front of the slice. (Reminiscent of the SVR4 /stand (?) > > concept). I can see right now the fracas this would cause 8( > > Yeah, we've already got this one: the partition is called `a', and > it's mounted as /. Where's that big difference here to /stand? /stand is a flat filesystem with a very simple structure; it can be easily read by simple code in a small bootstrap loader. It means all the ffs code in the current bootstrap loader could go. I'm certainly not sure it's a Good Idea, just one worth considering. > fan of any more boot stages. The 7.5 K limitation has one interesting > feature: it makes us fast, since you could not put a GUI into it. :-) It's _too_small_, or hadn't you noticed? There simply isn't room for all the features it _needs_. > Believe it or not, a separate /stand/boot tool will be bloated and > bloated until it will finally reaches its limits, too -- but it will > be much slower, and waste more boot time and disk space then. It > won't serve any better purpose however, and none of our current > problems can really be solved by it, except perhaps for the ``can only > boot off the compatibility slice'' one. Or the 'userconfig bloats the kernel' one, or the 'why can't I boot?' question that I (and you and countless others) have answered so many times. Then we could add, if the desired feature list makes it, 'what devices are in which kernel and how are they configured?', 'how can I boot with a different root filesystem', 'what do the flags at the boot: prompt mean' and so on and so forth. > cheers, J"org -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] My car has "demand start" -Terry Lambert UNIX: live FreeBSD or die! [[
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