Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 00:02:41 -0700 From: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org> To: Daniel O'Connor <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x Message-ID: <3FFE5211.5040606@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <200401091400.40550.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> References: <20040107235737.I32227@pooker.samsco.home> <20040108075059.GK53429@silverwraith.com> <200401091400.40550.doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
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Daniel O'Connor wrote: > On Thursday 08 January 2004 18:20, Avleen Vig wrote: > >>I understand it is difficult to maintain the floppies. I wish I >>understood them better :-) Is it not possible to have "ftp install" >>floppies, which do nothing more than simple FTP installations? > > > It wouldn't make it any easier. > > You still need the right drivers, ie which SCSI controller/network/... cards > you have to get a minimal install is _more_ when you are doing FTP (you need > a network). > > I think one possibility that wasn't mentioned is to have a floppy maintainer > that generates several sets of floppies that are used for non-CD > booting/no-CD installs which are available via download, and some are chucked > on the CD. ie make it a separate part of the release, so it is not directly > the install team's job. > > This would mean that the default 'make release' produces no floppy images. > Instead they are built separately and bundled with 'official' releases. It > would even be (fairly trivially) possible to setup a web site where you > select what cards you want support for and it makes a floppy image for you. > Even just having a page which tells you want card needs what KLD and where to > get the KLD's would help, as you could download them on your <other OS> and > put them on floppy yourself. > > Scott also said stuff like SCSI cards won't get probed if a module is loaded > but I can't see why that is true.. The module will load, the device get > detected, and then sysinstall is told to reprobe the hardware, so it should > pick it up. > Incorrect. Scanning SCSI buses is something that does not happen automatically. There is magic in the boot process that makes it happen near the end, right before the kernel looks for the root device. However, that is the exception to the rule. If you load a SCSI driver after the kernel has booted, the SCSI channel behind it will _not_ be probed automatically. Trust me on this one. Fixing this particular problem is well beyond the scope of fixing floppies in general. Until it gets fixed, floppies will just have to deal with it. > I see the 'which kld goes with what device' problem as separate to this issue. > The KLD load stuff DOES show a small description for each KLD so it isn't a > total black box, and heck, you can just pick everything and cross your > fingers :) > Take something like the if_dc(4) driver. It covers literally _dozens_ of cards and chips, all under different brands and manufacturers. There is no way that a single line description file will tell you if your hardware is supported by the if_dc driver. But this is a minor nit. As I've stated before, loading kernel modules after the kernel has booted is the wrong time to do it. The loader needs to be enhanced to be able to take care of this. Once that happens, we can trivially modify the release scripts to allow an arbitrary number of driver floppies to be created, and the maintenance nightmare goes away for the most part. Well, except when mfsroot.gz becomes too large to fit on a single floppy. Right now it is about 90k away from that. What happens when mount_nfsv4 gets put on there? John Baldwin and I already spent a day over the holiday break making the mfsroot.gz image fit given the new requirements created by having a dynamic root. What happens the next time that it overflows? It's not like the driver floppies where you can dike more stuff to another disk; this is a single image. Do we come up with a method for having multiple, segmented images? Who writes the code to do that? If we are going to keep floppies, then we need people who are willing to tackle these issues and keep them under control. Scott Scott
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