Re: A couple of things I noticed
> > 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.
SPARC PROM just loads first 8K from the media (no matter if it is disk, CD
or whatever) and executes it (well, only last 7.5K from it and even that
after stripping a.out header).
The rest is upon the boot loader.
SILO used a hack so that it could load files from the CD but I've posted a
few minutes ago a call for testers for the new SILO version which
understands iso9660 and RR natively.
But both with old SILO and current SILO you can read any image from the CD
into the core.
Cheers,
Jakub
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Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
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UltraLinux | http://ultra.linux.cz/ | http://ultra.penguin.cz/
Linux version 2.3.18 on a sparc64 machine (1343.49 BogoMips)
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