From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Oct 2 08:10:07 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id IAA14131 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 2 Oct 1996 08:10:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from karl.tools.de (karl.TooLs.DE [192.76.135.65]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id IAA14123 for ; Wed, 2 Oct 1996 08:10:02 -0700 (PDT) Received: from kurt.tools.de (kurt.TooLs.DE [192.76.135.70]) by karl.tools.de (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id RAA14990; Wed, 2 Oct 1996 17:09:11 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by kurt.tools.de (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id RAA23721; Wed, 2 Oct 1996 17:09:10 +0200 Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 17:09:10 +0200 From: ws@kurt.tools.de (Wolfgang Solfrank) Message-Id: <199610021509.RAA23721@kurt.tools.de> To: Chris_G_Demetriou@ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu Subject: Re: VPS mailing list, BSD interest? Cc: hackers@freebsd.org, tech-kern@NetBSD.ORG X-Sun-Charset: US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > Firmware which incorporates file system knowledge is Evil, and i'm not > aware of any current workstation-class hardware that ships with > firmware which attempts to (directly) understand file systems. (I > could be wrong, since i'm not intimately familiar with too many > machines' boot processes, but i think that, at least in this respect, > the overall brokenness of new systems is decreasing.) While one might argue that it is not "workstation-class hardware", both the PReP (PowerPC Reference Platform) and the PPCP (PowerPC Platform), aka CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) require that the firmware be able to load the bootcode from FAT filesystems or 9660 filesystems either directly from a disk or from an FDISK partition (including an extended one). In addition PPCP requires that the firmware be able to load the bootcode from a MacOS partition. Just to confuse things a bit :-). -- ws@TooLs.DE (Wolfgang Solfrank, TooLs GmbH) +49-228-985800