Floppy Support

[Duraid Madina]

Cliff L. Biffle wrote:

> On Saturday 03 May 2003 06:16 am, Duraid Madina wrote:
> 
>>Can anyone give a *good* reason why floppies should still be supported
>>from this point onwards?
> 
> 
> 1. El Torito.  Last I checked, under emulation, 2.88MB was the largest boot 
> image available, so fitting the bootloader/kernel/etc. onto two floppies is 
> still quite significant.

We could use El Torito's "type 4" hard disk emulation. Installing 
FreeBSD from such an environment seems a little gross, but religiously 
mangling kernels to fit onto 1.44Mb floppies seems worse.

> I've only run across one machine that could 
> competently handle non-emulated CD booting.

Time to update those 486s. The El Torito spec is dated January 1995, you 
know. ;)

> 2. Servers without CDROM drives.  As another poster mentioned, 1U rack or 
> clustering servers frequently don't have CDROMs.  I know mine don't.

Fine. PXE boot. What sort of sick f!#ker adds a floppy but leaves a CD 
out, anyway? And if you're missing both, surely it's somewhat less 
painful to walk around with a USB CDROM drive than to walk around with a 
pair of boot floppies?

> I'm still confused as to why the $CVS$ tags are going into the kernel on the 
> floppies, but that strikes me as minor. :-)

Indeed.

	Duraid