AMD64 boot floppies

[Scott Long]

Markus Trippelsdorf wrote:

> 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.

I'll happily accept patches from anyone who is interested in turning 
floppy support back on for amd64.  I'm not rejecting the idea, I'm just
saying that it might have some risks, and the overall long-term future 
is murky.

Scott