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

[David Gilbert]

>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel O'Connor <doconnor at gsoft.com.au> writes:

Daniel> On Friday 09 January 2004 10:04, Greg Shenaut wrote:
>> 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.

Daniel> *How* does it support all of those sources?  CD/DVD drives
Daniel> need drivers (ATA optimisticly, but quite possibly SCSI),
Daniel> FTP/NFS need network card support, NFS needs nfsclient.ko

You're missing the solution.  It's right in front of you.

For network drivers, support PXE, RTL and etherboot.  PXE even
provides the UDP portion of a TCP stack.

For disks, use BIOS.  No seriously.  BIOS support for cdroms and hard
disks is still maintained as it's required to support windoze
installs.  AFAIK, too, one cdrom driver works for all the modern
drives, too.

In fact, FreeDOS might be an excellent bootstrap platform.

Dave.

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|David Gilbert, Independent Contractor.       | Two things can only be     |
|Mail:       dave at daveg.ca                    |  equal if and only if they |
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