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Date:      Mon, 2 Oct 1995 16:00:05 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Julian Elischer <julian@ref.tfs.com>
To:        witr@rwwa.com (Robert Withrow)
Cc:        hackers@freefall.freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 2.1 will require a minimum of 8MB for installation.
Message-ID:  <199510022300.QAA00231@ref.tfs.com>
In-Reply-To: <199510021449.KAA14101@spooky.rwwa.com> from "Robert Withrow" at Oct 2, 95 10:49:30 am

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The trouble is.. What WAS the boot media?
net?
DOS?
floppy?
scsi tape?
once the kernel is loaded all it an rely on is it's own image..

> 
> 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
> 
> 




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