cvs commit: src/release/alpha drivers.conf

[Brooks Davis]

On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 11:46:51AM -0400, Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> 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. 

Taking a look at HP's website, there's a space you could stick a floppy
in the bezel on the larger one, but they aren't even an option on the
configuration.  I was a bit shocked to discover that you could get a
900MHz system for less then $3500.

Slightly tangentialy but related, I would suggest that AFTER 5.1 IS
RELEASED, it would be useful to look at building bootonly CDs like
those on snapshots.jp.freebsd.org as part of the release process.  That
wouldn't do anything for the "I don't want to waste a CD" crowd, but
it would help for those who just want to do an FTP install instead of
sucking down a giant ISO.  It also shouldn't cause the constaint drain
on RE resources because it's not really space constrained.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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