5.2-RELEASE miniroot

[Doug White]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2004, Jeff Blank wrote:

> Can someone clue me in on how sparc64/5.2-RELEASE/miniroot/miniroot.ufs.gz
> is to be used?  I can't find any mention of it in the install docs on
> the FreeBSD FTP server or web site.  I had assumed it was a bootable
> filesystem for starting an installer (like OpenBSD's minirootXX.fs
> is), but my Ultra5 refuses to boot it.  I guess I'm not surprised,
> though, since it doesn't look much like a filesystem when I view the
> first few bytes of the file, and it also seems rather bigger than a
> miniroot would need to be.  So I guess at this point, I'm mostly just
> curious as to what it's for.

Well first of all its gzipped so you'd need to undo that.

I think its mainly targetted if you want to do a netboot and you need a
filesystem for the kernel to grab.  Since all Suns have built in netboot
capability, you could exploit that to do automated installs and the like,
or just run diskless.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org