bootable, rootable, base, and the rest
Hey, this is Adam Di Carlo. Don't have my GECOS worked out.
I've been working with PCMCIA lately and it made me think about
these issues.
Regarding the state of the boot floppies, I think most of the
structure is already there. It seems to me that there could be
more shared logic between some of the components (i.e., building the
driver disk and the rescue disk scripts).
Essentially, the abstractions should be:
* bootablility -- defined by your system hardware (i.e., BIOS,
OpenBoot, whatever). The kernel loads and I guess it can suck
in initrd if we had one
media: boot disk, on floppy, CD, OS loader (m68k uses a lot of this),
tftp
* rootability -- loading the root file system. We currently have
this in the root.bin .
media: rescue disk or separate root disk, CD, TFTP
current limitations:
- we think we want both a 2.8MB option as well as 1.4MB
- we don't support root on a number of more exotic media,
such as PCMCIA floppy, ZIP drive, LS120
- the need to support new root.bin media would drive us to
create an initrd
* base system -- this is pretty much all already there -- just need
an http/ftp option for loading this as well.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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