Re: snapshots are broken

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

:I need boot floppies on no less than three of my systems (two headless systems
:with no CD-ROM boot support and a laptop with PCMCIA CD-ROM and ethernet)...
:
:                Cheers,
:
:                Mark.
:
-------------
:Galen Sampson wrote:
:> Define "BIOS disk".  I would like to be able to boot from a floppy to 
:> install.  The machine I have running dragonfly doesn't support booting 
:> from a CD at all....
:
:How about making a (non-DF-specific) floppy which boots the rest of the 
:OS from a CD?
:
:I've seen (and used) a few Linux installs where we did this (via LILO) 
:to boot from a secondary partition on a HD, when installing LILO to the 
:MBR was not permissible.  I don't know how different El Torito is from a 
:normal boot record, though.
:
:Another option that I fancy is to use a Compact Flash card as a boot 
:drive.  I don't have much experience with this; but I did have a 386 
:happily booting FreeBSD without any HDs, only a CF card in IDE emulation 
:mode.

    I think it's more a question as to whether we should attempt to package
    a kernel onto a floppy as part of the make release process.  I would
    argue that, likely, 95%+ of the people using DragonFly can either:

	* boot from CD, or
	* netboot (PXE), or
	* just put bootblocks on a floppy which then boot off a BIOS
	  recognizes disk/CD, or

    And that the remaining people will know enough to be able to build a
    custom kernel and install it on a floppy.  We could make this easier
    by providing a 'imagekernel' target which goes the extra step of 
    taking the kernel binary generated from a buildkernel and creating a
    floppy image suitable for dd'ing.

    e.g. I don't think we need to integrate floppy generation as part of
    make release. 

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>