Floppy Support

[Terry Lambert]

Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> I am generally assuming access to another PC here.
> 
> I understand what you are saying, and yes it would be good if the loader could
> use the BIOS to load drivers it determined you had hardware for or wished to
> load, but I think that is a non-trivial amount of work.

It sure is.  Which is why the issue keeps coming up, even though
it's been more than a decade since it was first raised and
publically discussed: no one is willing to do the work, and people
keep cramming more and more useless bloat into the kernel, so the
boot floppy fills up, and someone's favorite piece ends up getting
left out.  8-) 8-).


> If the loader groked cd9660 already it would be a lot easier.

But not backward compatible, because there's not enough room to
put the second stage boot between the front of the disk and the
disklabel.  We already have to choose between UFS1 and UFS2
support in the loader, as it is.  8-(.  And that's with some
fancy rewriting of the informational strings that get displayed
to the user, and some hacking of the macro wrappers for ident
strings to get them into a different ELF section and strip them
away.  8-(.

-- Terry