From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 2 07:46:18 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id HAA28135 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 07:46:18 -0700 Received: from spooky.rwwa.com (rwwa.com [198.115.177.3]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id HAA28119 for ; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 07:46:13 -0700 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by spooky.rwwa.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) with SMTP id KAA14101 for ; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 10:49:30 -0400 Message-Id: <199510021449.KAA14101@spooky.rwwa.com> X-Authentication-Warning: spooky.rwwa.com: Host localhost didn't use HELO protocol X-Mailer: exmh version 1.5.3 12/28/94 To: hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.1 will require a minimum of 8MB for installation. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Mon, 02 Oct 1995 10:49:30 -0400 From: Robert Withrow Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk I have a suggestion that you (i.e. hackers) probably won't like, but why not uncompress the kernel *from* the boot media. The way this would work would be kinda like how VMS boots. There would be a tertiary bootstrap whose job it would be to read and uncompress the kernel into the proper place in memory and start it running. I'm not real current in how FreeBSD boots, but I guess that the primary bootstrap (on the boot sector, or on the network card, or whatever) loads the secondary bootstrap which does some diagnostics, hardware initialization, memory sizing, etc.etc.etc. and, currently, loads and runs the kernel. Instead the secondary bootstap would load the tertiary bootstrap (or perhaps one of many tertiary bootstraps) pass it the necessary parameters, and the tertiary bootstrap would take it from there. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Withrow, Tel: +1 617 598 4480, Fax: +1 617 598 4430 Net: witr@rwwa.COM R.W. Withrow Associates, 319 Lynnway Suite 201, Lynn MA 01901 USA