DragonFly BSD
DragonFly kernel List (threaded) for 2003-11
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Re: snapshots are broken


To: dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Galen Sampson <galen_sampson@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2003 20:53:35 -0800

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




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