From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Jan 11 21:43:32 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from workhorse.iMach.com (workhorse.iMach.com [206.127.77.89]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6F43214F2D; Tue, 11 Jan 2000 21:43:27 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from forrestc@workhorse.iMach.com) Received: from localhost (forrestc@localhost) by workhorse.iMach.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id WAA12834; Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:41:46 -0700 (MST) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:41:45 -0700 (MST) From: "Forrest W. Christian" To: Mike Smith Cc: Geff Hanoian , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: fbsdboot.exe can't load elf kernels In-Reply-To: <200001120338.TAA03976@mass.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Mike Smith wrote: > 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. I agree with your statement in general. However, in the "truly" embedded PC world, the most popular off-the-shelf Flash Disk solution (M-Systems DiskOnChip-Millenium) is actually of this type. However, this solution also provides native drivers for Windows and a whole host of other OS'es. If there isn't a FreeBSD driver available, expect one from me in a few weeks. However, in the "truly" embedded world, you generally do not want a multiple-stage boot process. In fact, I have spent a fair bit of time eradicating (sp?) most of the "unneccesary" multi-stage boot from the PicoBSD stuff I'm doing for a product of mine. The idea of actually putting a DOS "partition" on the system seems crazy. > 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. There is only one circumstance in which this might be acceptable, and that is to support co-habitation with an OS which REQUIRES it's own MBR which doesn't support dual-booting to a FreeBSD partition. I can't think of any modern OS that works this way. And even if there was, I can think of a million other ways to get around this than writing a DOS-based loader. A few byte program which basically executes the FreeBSD bootstrap program comes to mind. - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc@imach.com) KD7EHZ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- iMach, Ltd., P.O. Box 5749, Helena, MT 59604 http://www.imach.com Solutions for your high-tech problems. (406)-442-6648 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message