Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 10:33:54 +1030 From: "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> To: David Gilbert <dgilbert@dclg.ca> Cc: Greg Shenaut <greg@bogslab.ucdavis.edu> Subject: Re: Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x Message-ID: <200401211033.54893.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> In-Reply-To: <16397.14213.159522.188280@canoe.dclg.ca> References: <200401082334.i08NYMx86020@thistle.bogs.org> <200401091404.34083.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> <16397.14213.159522.188280@canoe.dclg.ca>
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On Wednesday 21 January 2004 00:43, David Gilbert wrote: > >> I agree. The boot floppy tries to do w a y too much. I think we > >> should think of the boot floppy as way to implement an old-style > >> console emulator: it "boots" and you tell it where to read the > >> *real* boot image from. It should support all of the usual > >> sources: CDs/DVDs, NFS mounts, FTP, and so on. > > Daniel> *How* does it support all of those sources? CD/DVD drives > Daniel> need drivers (ATA optimisticly, but quite possibly SCSI), > Daniel> FTP/NFS need network card support, NFS needs nfsclient.ko > > You're missing the solution. It's right in front of you. > > For network drivers, support PXE, RTL and etherboot. PXE even > provides the UDP portion of a TCP stack. > > For disks, use BIOS. No seriously. BIOS support for cdroms and hard > disks is still maintained as it's required to support windoze > installs. AFAIK, too, one cdrom driver works for all the modern > drives, too. > > In fact, FreeDOS might be an excellent bootstrap platform. True.. Although I believe the loader could do it just as well and it's already imported :) (It uses the BIOS to read the kernel, and groks PXE, although I am hazy on the specifics) -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 9A8C 569F 685A D928 5140 AE4B 319B 41F4 5D17 FDD5
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