Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 10:34:19 -0600 From: Ade Lovett <ade@demon.net> To: Jacques Vidrine <n@nectar.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: boot floppy banner Message-ID: <E0y1DCt-00016r-00@sphinx.lovett.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 07 Feb 1998 10:04:49 CST." <199802071604.KAA13955@kai.nectar.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Jacques Vidrine writes: > >Let me state the obvious (but possibly naive) question: > >* Why not have a pair or more of different install images? An image > for a.out, and an image for ELF. Or an image with BAD144 (+possibly > other cruft) and an image without complete support for legacy > hardware? One of the major strongpoints of FreeBSD is its single-floppy install process.. having different boot.flp images depending on what level of functionality is needed in biosboot is something of an overkill, and is prone to pilot error - consider the bad old days of having multiple different boot images for NetBSD or Linux (from what I remember, RedHat Linux used to have 10's [if not 100's] of different images, depending on the hardware you had in the machine). The initial install has to be kept as simple as possible. If it requires floppy disk swapping, or different images, then the potential pilot error problems could push people away from using FreeBSD at all. Which is a bad thing. Of lesser importance is modifying the build process to keep track of all these different images. /sys/i386/boot is already a little hairy with 7 differing boot image directories - adding more is just going to make things that much more complicated. >* Why not use multiple disks during installation as necessary? That's not really the issue here. We're talking about extra functionality in biosboot -- the absolute first part of FreeBSD that boots, before the kernel image is loaded, executed, and control handed over to sysinstall. The problem is given the current functionality of biosboot, and various new proposed functionality, how do we make it all fit in 14 sectors (7168 bytes) of code. -aDe -- Ade Lovett, Demon Internet, Austin, Texas.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?E0y1DCt-00016r-00>