Date: Mon, 02 Feb 1998 11:49:09 +1030 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: ade@demon.net Cc: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: boot floppy banner Message-ID: <199802020119.LAA00856@word.smith.net.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 01 Feb 1998 19:16:42 MDT." <E0xzAV9-0004RV-00@sphinx.lovett.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> 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 :) Hmm, if you want to save space, try removing the bad144 stuff. It wastes a great deal of space for almost zero functionality. > 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 :) You are suggesting that if boot.banner is not found, boot.help is displayed by default? That's not unreasonable. > 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. Heh. I've just escaped that one too. 8) -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199802020119.LAA00856>