cvs commit: src/release Makefile

[Scott Long]

Sergey Babkin wrote:

>>From: Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy at optushome.com.au>
> 
> 
>>Some time ago, I was surprised to find that my son's oldish (mid 2003)
>>system was happy to try and boot off a USB memory stick.
> 
> 
> The BIOSes have been able to do this feat for a while now. There are two caveats though:
> 
> 1. It's slow, since BIOSes tend to use USB 1.x speeds,
> and even that not in a really fast way. So the big
> images are best to be avoided. Though probably it's 
> still faster than floppies.
> 
> 2. Accessing the root filesystem - the USB drivers
> have to be either statically compiled into the
> kernel or be loaded by the boot loader through BIOS
> (maybe through an analog of initrd ram disk - I'm
> not sure what advances have been done to the FreeBSD
> boot loader nowadays).
> 
> -SB
> 

The installer environment runs from a ramdisk that is loaded by
the kernel at boot.  That will probably change as we migrate to
new installers in the future, but that's how it works right now.

Scott