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To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Boot file system idea! Slick 
Cc: pechter@lakewood.com, terry@lambert.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 22 Jul 1997 11:13:13 +0930."
		<199707220143.LAA25905@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> 
References: <199707220143.LAA25905@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>  
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 1997 23:25:04 -0600
From: Warner Losh <imp@rover.village.org>
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In message <199707220143.LAA25905@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Michael Smith writes:
: ... this is just one small step from "boot from a kernel image on a
: DOS partition".

I know that the ARC BIOS MIPS boxes used exactly this approach.  The
bootstrap was loaded from a FAT file system.  That bootstrap then
loaded other things from either the FAT file system (if it was still
using the BIOS code) or from some other convenient location (if it had
enough of a driver to cope with the hardware).  NT, I think, used the
raw device and groked NTFS where it loaded its drivers before throwing
away the BIOS.  Trouble was, you needed to have a working FAT fs, or
you couldn't copy new kernels/boot code to the partition (OpenBSD/arc
has not boot loader, its kernel is in the right format).

So I think it is a cool idea, so long as it isn't mandatory :-)

Warner