cvs commit: src/release/alpha drivers.conf

[Robert Watson]

On Thu, 15 May 2003, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:

> On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 09:22:49AM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 08:39:30PM -0700, Jon Mini wrote:
> > > Robert Watson [rwatson at FreeBSD.org] wrote :
> > > > I think they'll be needed for i386 for a while yet, but when it comes to
> > > > the newer 64-bit platforms, I tend to agree.  I don't even know if you can
> > > > buy a sparc64 box with a floppy drive at this point...  It's hard for
> > > > me to imagine anyone shipping an ia64 or amd64 machine with a floppy
> > > > disk drive but without a bootable CDROM...
> > > 
> > > The last time I used a boot floppy was over a year ago when I had
> > > made some changes to the boot code and needed to make sure it still
> > > worked for floppies.
> > > 
> > > I can see the argument for supporting floppies on i386, but future
> > > platforms don't require it. I think that these days it is harder
> > > to find a floppy than a blank CDR, but then maybe that's because I
> > > have an Apple laptop.
> > > 
> > Not everyone has a CD-R/RW burner, you know that?  I'm more
> > in a mood to remove the support for modern drivers from BOOTMFS
> > and driver floppies, assuming that if one has a modern enough
> > hardware she also have a CD-ROM drive.  Killing functionality
> > like this would just decrease the number of potential FreeBSD
> > installations (not to say users).
> 
> I second this.  Floppies are going to be in use for quite a long time
> just yet.  Lots of people prefer to install from FTP while booting from
> floppies to save the disc for something more useful than bootstrap
> platform for one-time installation. 

Note that the discussion here has to do specifically with the 64-bit
platforms, not i386.  The current strawman proposal being discussed is:

i386		Floppy install support indefinitely due to floppy drives
		still shipping in most machines.

alpha		Deprecate floppy support, if we can't demonstrate an
		interest in the FreeBSD-alpha community for the
		continued use of floppy disk installs, as this would
		improve our ability to support Alpha releases in the
		future.

sparc64		We don't currently support floppy disk installs; make an
		intentional policy decision not to support them in the
		future.

amd64		We don't currently support floppy disk installs; make an
		intentional policy decision not to support them in the
		future.

I don't know what the current status of floppy installs is with ia64, and
what vendor plans are for ia64.  Nothing would preclude re-supporting
floppies in the future on these platforms if it became desirable -- the
floppy disk device drivers aren't going away or anything, of course.  But
by not supporting them in the short term, we save a lot of time commitment
by the RE team to just making drivers fit on floppies in order to get
intermediate snapshots out the door.  As the number of floppies also
increases, we start having to deal with usability issues -- do we want to
force every user to put in every floppy?  If not, we need a way to
determine what floppies they put in, but that's complicated in that you
have to put in the floppy to load the device driver to know if you need
the device driver...  i386 may inevitably require a long parade of
floppies, but there's no need to burden the newer platforms with that
until it proves highly desirable to do so.  Or to put it another way: if
you spent $7k on an ia64 server, the chances are you have a CD burner. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories