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

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Wednesday 21 January 2004 00:43, David Gilbert wrote:
> >> 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.
>
> Daniel> *How* does it support all of those sources?  CD/DVD drives
> Daniel> need drivers (ATA optimisticly, but quite possibly SCSI),
> Daniel> FTP/NFS need network card support, NFS needs nfsclient.ko
>
> You're missing the solution.  It's right in front of you.
>
> For network drivers, support PXE, RTL and etherboot.  PXE even
> provides the UDP portion of a TCP stack.
>
> For disks, use BIOS.  No seriously.  BIOS support for cdroms and hard
> disks is still maintained as it's required to support windoze
> installs.  AFAIK, too, one cdrom driver works for all the modern
> drives, too.
>
> In fact, FreeDOS might be an excellent bootstrap platform.

True..
Although I believe the loader could do it just as well and it's already 
imported :)

(It uses the BIOS to read the kernel, and groks PXE, although I am hazy on the 
specifics)

-- 
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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