Floppies for ALPHA

[David O'Brien]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 11:21:50PM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 12:54:49PM -0700, David O'Brien wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 10:23:43PM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > > > Other than that I think the patch does what you intend it to do.
> > > > 
> > > Thanks, it sure does.  :-)
> > > But does that also mean that you'd feel comfortable if I committed
> > > it now?
> > 
> > Not as posted.  As I mentioned, the patch does too much.  Can you post a
> > new patch that produces a single 8MB MFSBOOT "floppy" image?
> > 
> MFSBOOT?  This is something new.  :-)
> 
> I guess you mean the current boot.flp by it, right?  If yes,
> I can't see a point in having it, so please explain.  How it
> could be used?
> 
> For sparc64, boot.flp is useful, beause "you can dd it to a disk
> from solaris and then boot off it to install", according to
> Jake.  Can the same be made on Alpha?

Yes it can.  MFSROOT(BOOT) what ever you want to call it.  I.e., / is not
the hard disk you want to install on -- thus it has to be RAM disk so the
real hard disk device isn't opened.

> The idea is to have a miniboot.iso that just resembles the
> contents of the boot.flp, but can be used to boot off the
> CD-ROM (and then do an FTP installation, for example).

NO!  The idea is to have an image that has / as a memory file system,
that has a full GENERIC kernel *and* has a full set of modules *and* has
sysinstall as /sbin/init.

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)