news about CD booting
First, I have left aside the idea of booting milo through SRM
(altough I finally know how to do it, basically that means running
aboot with the OpenVMS palcode, which requires setting maually a
virtual to physical mapping). Anyway with SRM, all archs will be able
to boot from the CD anyway thanks to a generic 2.2.2 kernel.
Second about the root filesystem, as far as I understand, there was no
initrd (or other similar) mechanism that would allow to mount the root
filesystem from the CD (except by putting a verbatim filesystem on CD,
but that would require changing things in the installation procedure,
and diverging from i386, so creating a lot of problems).
To implement such a mechanism, I have modified the ramdisk
driver, to be able to load a ramdisk not only from a floppy but from
any device with a iso9660 image, I store the offset of the root image
in an application_data field of the iso volume descriptor (aka
super-block). This field is written with a modified isomarkboot.
Hope it makes sense (at least I have got the first test working).
Before I generate a new set of kernels with this patch, is the last
floppy patch posted by Paul the right one to include?
Finally, I have done recently several installation using only the
serial port, and there is support to do it in the installation
program, but as I have heard some report problems with the serial
driver on some archs, I hesitate to recompile the kernels with the
serial support inside the kernel, what do you think?
Loic
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