Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 03:46:39 -0800 (PST) From: Dmitry Kohmanyuk <dk@dog.farm.org> To: adrian@obiwan.aceonline.com.au (Adrian Chadd) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Small Disk Xterminal Message-ID: <199703311146.DAA06808@dog.farm.org>
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In article <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970328113953.375B-100000@obiwan.aceonline.com.au> you wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Joe Greco wrote:
> > I have a not-very-polished set of tools that allows me to build a floppy
> > disk (1.44MB) that contains a minimal (MINIMAL) FreeBSD configuration on
> > an MFS filesystem. This is potentially very handy for things like small
> > routers, terminal servers, etc. It is ALSO useful to build a minimal
> > Xterminal (although the Xterminal requires an -ro NFS mount from
> > someplace).
> >
> Why?
> What other programs would the straight X server need? Could you fit them
> compressed onto a 1.44mb floppy?
I don't think that even a compressed server itself can fit into 1.44 floppy.
see:
dog:/usr/X11/bin# gzip -9 < XF86_S3 | wc
3697 22451 1050627
and we still have to put kernel there... (not saying about sh, init, etc.)
> I was thinking of booting off a floppy disk, and "netbooting" (kinda), by
> getting what was needed, placing it into a minimal ramdisk on the machine,
> and then running totally diskless.
or, get some DOSish tftp client which can unzip dosboot into RAM disk
using a packet driver... seems to be not so hard? It should be even
possible to write/find a standalone RAM disk and tftp programs for real mode,
without using that M$-written non-reentrant interrupt handler mistaken
for the operating system... there are emx and djgpp to compile the code with.
I already have a public domain bootsector for FAT filesystem ;-)
Oh well, this only have to be a single program, using packet driver
to tftp the kernel and then load it properly (using netboot as a reference
implementation, but maybe doing it more cleanly). Even better, it can
be used to tftp the standard secondary-stage bootblock which would then
load the kernel itself... hmm.
Of course, Terry's idea of modular kernel with fallback drivers using
vm86 is cleaner.
> Yes, RAM is so relatively cheap you wouldn't really have problems with it.
> I know of xterms with 4 and 8mb RAM that run just fine when netbooted.
you probably mean `hardware' xterms (running their own OS)?
btw, I have NCD 88k, and it's boot image is 2.5M, including TCP networking
(BSD-derived, according to copyright), local WM, and telnet, nifty setup,
and NFS- or tftp-based font access.
Oh well, and it even does LAT and VMS pathnames ;-) and Xremote
and who-knows-what else... All that on a RISC CPU...
--
What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri?
- Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz (THHGTTG)
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