Fix make release for 4-STABLE

[John Baldwin]

On Monday 19 January 2004 05:58 am, Makoto Matsushita wrote:
> list> What about splitting the floppies? Splitfs support is already on
> list> the 4.9-RELEASE disks.
>
> That would be a viable option, but the great downside of using splitfs
> is that all of splitted chunks are required for all users.
>
> In the current configuration, drivers.flp is an option; if you don't
> need to use modules in drivers.flp, you only need two floppies.  If
> the kernel and/or mfsroot image are splitted into, say, three
> floppies, we have to have three floppies.
>
> Yes, floppies are so cheap to buy, but sometimes not handy you know.
> I believe that some of my friends said to me that "hey, I'm so tired
> to write THREE floppy images, it's so slow!"
>
> It would be technically easy to introduce splitfs for kernel/mfsroot
> (it is already there), but it also introduce an important design change.
> We should have enough time to consider that we decide the 3rd floppy
> image treats a mandatory one.

I have splitfs done in a p4 tree.  Currently for i386 on current it takes up 3 
floppies.  One more floppy image is not all that bad, and it removes all the 
kernel module complication.  This is using a GENERIC kernel, so it greatly 
simplifies release building and requires no more tweaking of BOOTMFS to make 
stuff "just fit".  I'm currently doing some final testing before committing 
it to HEAD as I've occasionally had problems with the split images being 
loaded off of floppy.  I added a md5 command to the loader today and it 
verified that the mfsroot and kernel were read ok, however.  I have this bad 
feeling that there is some kind of memory corruption bug in the loader and 
that the problem goes away if you use a loader that has forth in it.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org