AMD64 boot floppies

[Markus Trippelsdorf]

On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 08:54:39AM -0700, Scott Long wrote:
> Markus Trippelsdorf wrote:
> 
> >On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 08:00:49PM -0800, David O'Brien wrote:
> >
> >>On Fri, Dec 30, 2005 at 08:34:50AM -0500, John Baldwin wrote:
> >>
> >>>On Friday 30 December 2005 08:05 am, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>On Fri, Dec 30, 2005 at 12:45:57PM +0100, Andrea Brancatelli wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>>For i386 we have
> >>>>>ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/6.0-RELEASE/floppies/
> >>>>>but for Amd64 there's no
> >>>>>ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/6.0-RELEASE/floppies/
> >>>>>
> >>>>>How can I get installation floppies for 6.0 / amd64?
> >>>>
> >>>>http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/installation-amd64.html#FLOPPIES
> >>>
> >>>FYI, it would be trivial to support with the splitfs stuff now.  You'd
> >>>basically just need to copy over the variables from i386 to set the
> >>>sizes, etc.
> >>
> >>please, Please, PLEASE no... why add the pain of floppies to the release
> >>mix when no one in their right mind as an AMD64 machine that has a floppy
> >>drive AND doesn't have a CDROM (or DVD) drive.
> >
> >
> >But I guess, the are many AMD64 machines that don't have a CDROM- or
> >DVD- burner build in. For these machines a few floppy images to start a
> >network installation would be helpful.
> >
> 
> My impression was the floppy drives are disappearing from servers faster
> than CDROM drives are.  It's certainly possible to start generating 
> floppies for amd64, but that has not been done in a very long time, so
> it could turn into a big mess of unknown bugs.  Also, we will eventually
> move to a new installer, one that cannot easily fit onto floppies.  That
> day might not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen sometime.
> Most server systems these days do support PXE booting, and that can 
> actually be more convenient than floppies if handled correctly.

Just an example:
When I upgraded my old Celeron box a year ago, I had to buy a CDROM
burner, so that I could burn the install CD for my new machine. Since
than it is sitting idle in its slot. Had a floppy image been available
at that time, it would have saved me the ~30 Euro for the burner.
BTW, all other main BSD variants offer floppy images for the AMD64
architecture.
-- 
Markus