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X-To: Michel TALON <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 08 Jan 2004 17:37:24 +0100."
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Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 15:34:22 -0800
From: Greg Shenaut <greg@bogslab.ucdavis.edu>
Subject: Re: Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x 
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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