Floppies for ALPHA

[John Baldwin]

On 29-Jul-2003 David O'Brien wrote:
>     [ Reply-to: set back to list ]
>     
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 07:38:48PM +0200, Wilko Bulte wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 12:54:36PM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
>> > I've got that feeling that the consensus was to drop the floppy
>> > support for Alpha, as supporting it becomes a nightmare.  If so,
>> 
>> Yes, that consensus seems to be there. Finally.. :)
>> 
>> The question is if the way forward is a minimini.iso so a really
>> minimal ISO image (<< in size that miniinst.iso) or some other mechanism
>> like NetBSD or ancient SunOS 3.x used. Which, IIRC, was an image one dropped
>> in to the swap area of a disk and booted from. 
> 
> Why do we have to choose one?  We should offer multiple ways (as we do
> today).  The problem is not offering a small downloadable image to
> install an Alpha from -- but that 1.44MB is a ridiculous size constraint
> for that image.

All we need is a truly miniiso.  More of a boot-only iso.  The same thing
could be stuck in a UFS image if people wish.  Basically a /R/cdrom/boot
that contains just the /boot directory contents.  People can then either
make an ISO from that or they can make a UFS image and dd it to a disk.

This would be orthogonal to floppies, btw.  Probably we would always
create the boot.iso area under /R and on archs that can use it, we can
create a UFS disk image that contains that system.  On the other hand,
if dd'ing an actual ISO works fine, then we could just leave it at that.

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/