Floppies for ALPHA

[Ruslan Ermilov]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 08:40:52AM -0700, David O'Brien wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 07:59:46AM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > Please provide a real-world scenario how this image could be
> > used.  The contents of MFS root floppy does *NOT* have a
> > kernel, and just increasing its size to say 10M won't do
> > the trick.
> 
> At this point I almost think you're just purposefully being dense.
> 
No, of course not.  Let's not start it again, PLEASE.

> If
> you can't figure out the functionality I'm talking about please go find
> an old Sun3 or Sun4c machine and install SunOS.
> 
I'm just trying to understand how a file system image can be
useful on Alpha.  When I asked a similar question for sparc64,
the answer was:

On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 11:57:58AM -0400, Jake Burkholder wrote:
>
> boot.flp is actually useful on sparc64 because you can dd it to a disk
> from solaris and then boot off it to install.  I'm happy with having
> the option of not building it if it saves time but please make it an
> option.
>
> Jake

Something along these lines for Alpha?

Even if it does work for Alpha too (please tell me how), the
miniboot.iso is still much more useful, as it allows one to install
on a "bare" machine, while using a file system image requires
some other OS/loader/whatever already installed on this machine
that also understands this file system image.

While I can easily see how this works for sparc64 (it uses sunlabel(8)
which SUNs apparently understand), I cannot intuit how and if the same
is going to work on Alpha, so please tell me.

This is a simple question: given the file system image with
a GENERIC kernel and an MFS root file system on it, how it
can be used to install FreeBSD on Alpha?


Cheers,
-- 
Ruslan Ermilov		Sysadmin and DBA,
ru at sunbay.com		Sunbay Software Ltd,
ru at FreeBSD.org		FreeBSD committer
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-alpha/attachments/20030730/071cb25b/attachment.bin