Use of Floppy Drive with FreeBSD Virtual Machines

[Michael Dexter]

Hello Abhishek,

On 11/11/13 11:37 AM, Abhishek Gupta (LIS) wrote:
> Thanks so much for replying. Some follow up questions:
> 
> a) Is it not possible to use an ISO file to do the BIOS updates?

I have not.

> b) I did not quite understand your second comment on why PCI pass
> through may promote floppy disk use. Please could you elaborate a bit
> more?

The scenario I see the most is a virtualized (HyperV, VMware etc.)
FreeNAS guest to which you pass a PCIe storage controller card to so
that ZFS is given "bare metal" access to hardware disks yet has the
benefit of the fast internal backplane if you will for networking,
rather than going over copper or optical network interfaces.

Because the FreeNAS guest may be one among many, it would not be
desirable to reboot the whole system and boot to a floppy to apply a
BIOS update to a PCIe controller card. Again, I have not tried anything
like this but it is a possible use case of what you describe. Also mind
you I never want to see another floppy-based BIOS again but they are
still out there.

Michael