Floppies for ALPHA

[Wilko Bulte]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 04:49:07PM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> 
> 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.

Given that I just put an extra disk in the 4100 I'll try that and
report back. 

-- 
|   / o / /_  _   		wilko at FreeBSD.org
|/|/ / / /(  (_)  Bulte