Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Leo Bicknell]

I'm going to propose a different solution that was brought up about
two years ago (although I can't find it now).

You start with something like the CD boot image mentioned, that is
a 3-5 Meg iso image that basically contains what is now on the
floppies (perhaps with a few more drivers/modules) and nothing more.
Downloading and burning to CD would be the primary method of install.

Then, to replace the current floppy process, a new floppy installer
is created.  It may or may not be based on FreeBSD, but what it
needs to be able to do is boot, load a network driver, configure
the network, and ftp the above mentioned iso into ram, and then
jump into the kernel from the iso as if it had been loaded from a
CD.

Yes, I'm grossly oversimplifing the process, but it removes all of
sysinstall from the floppy, all the need for crunchgen and all that,
as it should be fairly easy (again, perhaps not with a full kernel)
to support a number of network drivers and a basic FTP client on a
single floppy.  The only real direct freebsd issue is to make the
kernel able to boot itself from memory, and then treat that memory
as a ram disc on boot.

It would require a whole new floppy booter setup, but I can see
other OS projects using something like this as well, so perhaps
some cross work with NetBSD or OpenBSD, or even the Linux camp could
make an open source "load an image" floppy, that since it just
loaded an ISO could load about anything.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/attachments/20040108/bb5444a2/attachment.bin