From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 2 16:01:36 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id QAA29711 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 16:01:36 -0700 Received: from ref.tfs.com (ref.tfs.com [140.145.254.251]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id QAA29701 for ; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 16:01:30 -0700 Received: (from julian@localhost) by ref.tfs.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id QAA00231; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 16:00:05 -0700 From: Julian Elischer Message-Id: <199510022300.QAA00231@ref.tfs.com> Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.1 will require a minimum of 8MB for installation. To: witr@rwwa.com (Robert Withrow) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 1995 16:00:05 -0700 (PDT) Cc: hackers@freefall.freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199510021449.KAA14101@spooky.rwwa.com> from "Robert Withrow" at Oct 2, 95 10:49:30 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1235 Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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 > >