Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x
Greg Shenaut
greg at bogslab.ucdavis.edu
Thu Jan 8 15:26:45 PST 2004
In nuntio <20040108163724.GA26745 at 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
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