Re: CD issues
Would it be possible to do the following:
1) Take all the cd drivers which can be made as modules out of the boot kernel
- this should solve some problems (like machines with ne2000 cards locking up
on boot - I know how to get around this, but does a newbie?) This would also
make life easier later - at the moment I pretty much have to compile a custom
kernel for each machine I install for people so they don't go mad waiting for
all the cd probes at the beginning. This would save me a quite bit of time.
2) Add a menu thingy as the first thing after getting the root filesystem
mounted to load the appropriate CD module before we continue booting. At this
point we should be able to mount the cd somewhere so we don't need the base
system to be on a floppy, right? Oh, we should build the iso9660 filesystem
into the kernel as well. And we need some way of remebering which cd module we
used so we can insert into /etc/modules later.
The main problem is we might overflow a floppy. If we do that, we should
probably put whatever we consider to be the most popular CD drivers on the
floppy, and have another floppy image on the CD which people can insert into
the drive when asked 'which CD type do you have'. I don't think it is too
unreasonable to make people with unusual hardware write an extra floppy at some
point.
So what is wrong with this approach? As far as I can see it should kill 2 birds
with 1 stone (single floppy boot and unsafe probing by random drivers)
David
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