Re: A couple of things I noticed
On Sat, Sep 18, 1999 at 01:59:48AM +1200, Sam Vilain wrote:
> Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org> writes:
>
> > > BTW, unrelated to Sparc: Are there any plans to offer an enhanced
> > > installation environment (a real shell instead of ash, nice suite of tools
> > > to use in case of problems booting, etc.) on future versions of bootable
> > > CD-ROMs? The current cramped install environment makes sense when floppies
> > > are the preferred installation method, but these days, wouldn't it make
> > > sense to offer both the stripped-down version and a beefier one?
> > Although we are talking about CDROM's, the fact is the format of bootable
> > CD's must be the same as a floppy. I'm not exactly sure of the technical
> > reasons for this, but it is my understanding.
>
> Booting from CD has been supported on Sun systems at least since the
> sun4c (classic) came out. The drive presents itself as a plain
> 512-byte block SCSI device. Solaris CD install images simply have a
> SysV bootlabel and UFS filesystems on them (UFS on a CLV device is
> slow, in case you were wondering).
We realize that, but having out bootdisks as UFS isn't feasible, we have to
use the iso9660 format along with rockridge extensions and El Torito for
booting.
Although, I wonder if the SPARC bootable CD's could be an ext2 image, although
I'm unsure about the boot label, unless it likes SILO.
Ben
Reply to: