Re: snapshots are broken

[Galen Sampson <galen_sampson@xxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
> :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. 
Thats fair.  Maybe what we need is a floppy that can load what would be 
the boot block of a cd and jump to it, running the cd as though it had 
been booted.  The floopy would, literally, be a bootstrap.  No kernel, 
etc, just a way to get a cd that has those things up and running.  Maybe 
this exists and I don't know about it.

regards,
Galen