Date: Sun, 01 Feb 1998 19:16:42 -0600 From: Ade Lovett <ade@demon.net> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: boot floppy banner Message-ID: <E0xzAV9-0004RV-00@sphinx.lovett.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 01 Feb 1998 09:59:07 %2B1030." <199801312329.JAA00596@word.smith.net.au>
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Mike Smith writes: > >This loses in the case where there is no boot.banner message. Help is >not displayed by default anymore, and there is no way to determine that >you need to type said command. Unfortunately, I've yet to find a way to do this without making the resulting binary too big -- 300 bytes isn't an awful lot to play around with :) That's not to say it couldn't be done, but it would require a not insignificant amount of work to figure out where some existing code can be rewritten to be smaller -- it'll also interfere with any 'real' extra functionality that others want to put in at a later date. I understand the problem with not having a "type 'help'" tag somewhere in the boot loader itself, but is the situation where we don't have a boot.banner (and thus no indication of how to get help) such a major issue? After all, we can ensure that a boot.banner will be present after an initial system install. Should the end-user then go and delete boot.banner, is it not reasonable to assume that they're "advanced" in that they'll remember to be able to type 'help' at the boot prompt? (assuming of course that they haven't trashed boot.text as well :) This is all horribly reminisicent of spending days, data sheets in hand, trying to shave just that one extra cycle out of code, trying to make it fit into horribly small eeproms for embedded systems, many moons ago. -aDe -- Ade Lovett, Demon Internet, Austin, Texas.
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