Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Friday 09 January 2004 10:04, Greg Shenaut wrote:
> In nuntio <20040108163724.GA26745 at lpthe.jussieu.fr>, Michel TALON divulgat:
> >By the way, what's the reason that it is impossible to have just one
> >floppy which boots FreeBSD kernel, allows to see an unbootable cdrom
> >and continue installation from here?
>
> I agree.  The boot floppy tries to do w a y too much.  I think we
> should think of the boot floppy as way to implement an old-style
> console emulator: it "boots" and you tell it where to read the
> *real* boot image from.  It should support all of the usual sources:
> CDs/DVDs, NFS mounts, FTP, and so on.

*How* does it support all of those sources?
CD/DVD drives need drivers (ATA optimisticly, but quite possibly SCSI), 
FTP/NFS need network card support, NFS needs nfsclient.ko

ie this is the exact problem it has now :)

You could save a little space with your idea because you wouldn't need 
sysinstall which is admittedly quite large, but it wouldn't address the 
fundamental issue.

If you want floppy installs you need a way of putting arbitary drivers onto 
floppy disks easily so users can grab what they need and use it instead of 
having to second guess what sort of hardware they are likely to be using.

IMHO of course 8-)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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