Strategy for boot-floppies
I guess it's time to think about a general movement wrt. our boot
floppies. I believe that it is obvious that we will run into much
problems when we continue to try to place the kernel and the root
filesystem onto the same floppy.
Haggie told me that at least for the powerpc port this is impossible
since the current state will create 1.7MB already. It might work for
ia32 at the moment but might also fail in the near future.
Thus I believe we should discuss our strategy.
This is what Haggie and myself were thinking about:
. Booting via bootable CDROM
Create a 2.88MB floppy to use as ElTorito boot image. This floppy
will contain the kernel and the root image.
People who boot off of a 2.88MB floppy will benefit from it as
well.
. Support for ftp/tftp fetching of the base system
Our base system is the biggest disadvantage that debian provides at
installation time. Currently one has to find 7 sane floppies for
it if the system does not come with a cd and nfs is not posssible.
We should support fetching as much as we can from the network if
there is one.
. Splitting the rescue disk
Since we are running into trouble we should face the truth and
discuss if it would be wise to split the rescue disk into a boot
disk and a root disk.
If so, would it be possible to fetch the root disk, i.e. the
ramdisk, from the net? If so, how can we boot off of the boot
floppy to achieve this?
. Support for JAZZ/ZIP drives
These drives are botable and may contain 100MB or even 250MB on
it. The minimum we should support is a system that people can just
copy to their disk and boot off of it.
[ dbootstrap: is it possible to detect a jazz/zip drive? If so,
look for drives, resc and base disks there without asking the
user.]
. Installation via loadlin
I guess this way is not affected by a split since it loads root.bin
separately already.
Regards,
Joey
--
A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.
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