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Date:      Wed, 30 Apr 1997 18:26:13 +0930 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans)
Cc:        bde@zeta.org.au, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, config@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Startup userconfig parsing
Message-ID:  <199704300856.SAA27950@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <199704300837.SAA13095@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from Bruce Evans at "Apr 30, 97 06:37:30 pm"

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Bruce Evans stands accused of saying:
> >
> >Hmm.  Full-circle back to the three-stage boot I guess.
> 
> Nope.  That would be overengineered.

Weeping not being my strong point, I feel close to real violence here 8)

> >At this point, I'm inclined to seriously question whether you would 
> >consider anything other than a rock to be appropriately engineered.
> 
> `cat' with no options was fine :-).

Gack.  How do you live with yourself these days?

> No, it's desired to have no user-specified configuration data then.
> Userconfig etc. are "temporary" kludges to get around h/w and BIOS
> braindamage.

Ah, I see.  Well, let's apply the sophistry a little further, and suggest
that in order to get around some more of this braindamage that some more
extensive and organised kludging is required.

> >expected to perform the interpretation.  I still don't understand how
> >ed is meant, one way or another, to have anything to do with arbitrary
> >data intended for consumption by the kernel.
> 
> boot: -s
> ...
> # mount /
> # ed /boot.config	# fix up booting problems
> # ed /etc/fstab		# fix up mounting problems
> ...

Yeeees.  And how, in the above scenario, is 'ed' supposed to be
"interpreting" the configuration information?  To me it looks like
it's 'ed'iting it, under the control of a user, who is responsible for
interpreting it.

> Page 0 is always preserved, and there's 2.5K or 3.5K to spare in it.  This
> is a nice limit for a config file size (stops you from overengineering it
> :-) but is too small for splash screens.  It would probably be simplest
> for the bootstrap to put things below 640K and delay use of some pages
> below 640K.

This is what I want to do; I have been trying to work out how to arrange 
for the delayed use.  It is not possible to mandate a fixed location
unfortunately; both 'very low' and 'very high' are liable to occupation
if eg. booting under DOS, so the passing of an address and size to the
kernel is necessary.

> Bruce

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@gsoft.com.au             [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@gsoft.com.au            [[
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