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

[Nicolas Rachinsky]

* Brooks Davis <brooks at one-eyed-alien.net> [2004-01-11 11:02 -0800]:
> If you could make this work such that you just stuffed GENERIC and the
> mfsroot onto however many floppies it takes, I think that would almost
> certaintly solve re's problems with floppies (i.e. if all they had to do
> when the kernel/mfsroot got too big was to bump a NUMFLOPPIES
> variable.)  Sure that would suck for the floppy users, but that would
> put the pain in the place where it's most likely to cause someone to
> come up with some better.
> 
> Now, who wants to give this a try?

OK, I tried now the following:

I made copies of the 4.9 RELEASE Floppies, split the half of the
kernel and mfsroot to another floppy and added two appropriate
splitfiles.

Afterwards booting from these four disks worked fine.

disk1:
/boot
/kernel.gz.split
/kernel.gzaa

"Message from libstand"

disk2:
/kernel.gzab

"Message from loader.rc"

disk3:
/mfsroot.gz.split
/mfsroot.gzaa

"Message from libstand"

disk4:
/mfsroot.gzab


I don't know the release build process, so I don't know how much
effort is neccessary to create such floppies, but the loader seems to
have all features needed to use such disks.

Nicolas