Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 15:34:22 -0800 From: Greg Shenaut <greg@bogslab.ucdavis.edu> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x Message-ID: <200401082334.i08NYMx86020@thistle.bogs.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 08 Jan 2004 17:37:24 %2B0100." <20040108163724.GA26745@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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In nuntio <20040108163724.GA26745@lpthe.jussieu.fr>, Michel TALON divulgat: >By the way, what's the reason that it is impossible to have just one >floppy which boots FreeBSD kernel, allows to see an unbootable cdrom >and continue installation from here? I agree. The boot floppy tries to do w a y too much. I think we should think of the boot floppy as way to implement an old-style console emulator: it "boots" and you tell it where to read the *real* boot image from. It should support all of the usual sources: CDs/DVDs, NFS mounts, FTP, and so on. The real boot image would know how to format drives, install distributions & packages, and so on. This "boot console" floppy would only need to change to support new hardware, and there could even be boot-source-specific versions of it. Once you had one that worked on a specific type of PC, you could keep using it indefinitely. Greg Shenaut
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