Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 19:38:24 -0800 From: Mike Smith <msmith@freebsd.org> To: Geff Hanoian <boing@boing.com> Cc: forrestc@iMach.com (Forrest W. Christian), msmith@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: fbsdboot.exe can't load elf kernels Message-ID: <200001120338.TAA03976@mass.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 11 Jan 2000 19:20:52 PST." <200001120320.TAA12354@kusanagi.boing.com>
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> > Of course, the ones which truly emulate an IDE drive at the hardware level > > just work like an IDE drive, although slower on writes. > > > > The BIOS ones get tricky. Obviously, if the boot loader only uses bios > > calls to do it's dirty work, these work well, at least through the boot > > process. If the boot loader tries to access the hardware directly, and it > > doesn't directly support the flash device, then the boot loader doesn't > > work. Of course, this also applies to the OS. > > And that's assuming you could actually get a UFS partition on the "drive > emulator thing"? But if you were only capable of loading files to a fat16, > then wouldn't fbsdboot.exe (or whatever it's called) be necessary? No. Firstly, you are again raising a hypothetical question without actually suggesting anything that might require this, so bear with me if I don't take it too seriously. Things just don't really work like this. However, if you assume that you can for some reason only boot from a FAT16 filesystem, and for some reason you want to run FreeBSD on this hardware and only this hardware, then you would rewrite boot2 to read FAT filesystems. There is still no need to boot DOS. In a very few cases, you'll find disk 'emulators' that offer BIOS interfaces to the emulated disk. These are rapidly declining in popularity because they offer very poor performance for Windows-using customers. They also typically fare very poorly or not at all under other operating systems, as they tend to require timer interrupts in a very hostile fashion. Please; take it from me that "booting DOS to boot another operating system" is so far beyond a joke in most situations that we don't even want to pretend in public that it's done, let alone talk about supporting it. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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