Fix make release for 4-STABLE

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday 20 January 2004 04:41 pm, Scott Long wrote:
> John Baldwin wrote:
> > 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.
>
> This is excellent work.  Thanks a lot.

We should even be able to turn Alpha floppies back on now with no worries. :)

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