Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 19:27:51 +1100 From: Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy@optushome.com.au> To: Scott Long <scottl@pooker.samsco.org> Cc: cvs-src@freebsd.org, src-committers@freebsd.org, cvs-all@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/release Makefile Message-ID: <20060201082751.GA824@turion.vk2pj.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <20060131132643.E10747@pooker.samsco.org> References: <200601301424.k0UEOVnw098992@repoman.freebsd.org> <1138631402.96727.4.camel@opus.cse.buffalo.edu> <1138734787.719.9.camel@opus.cse.buffalo.edu> <20060131192545.GA9936@freebie.xs4all.nl> <20060131132643.E10747@pooker.samsco.org>
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On Tue, 2006-Jan-31 13:39:33 -0700, Scott Long wrote: >Note: this amounts to life support for floppies. The end IS coming. What >we need is for people to start working out the kinks of using usb ram >drives to run the installer. This isn't the same as running nanobsd or >picobsd, this is about creating an image like the CD bootonly ISO that >can be easily transfered to USB and run at boot. Some time ago, I was surprised to find that my son's oldish (mid 2003) system was happy to try and boot off a USB memory stick. As an experiment, I just tried (on 6-STABLE): # mdconfig -a -t malloc -s 95m -u 10 # fdisk -B md10 # bsdlabel -wrB md10s1 # newfs md10s1a # mount /dev/md10s1a /a # cd /a # dump -0f - / | restore -rf - # umount /a # dd if=/dev/md10 of=/dev/da0 bs=8k and then rebooting off the memory stick - the activity LED showed that this worked. It got to single user (though since I hadn't updated fstab, it mounted ad0s2a as root). Admittedly, this is on a brand new laptop but I have no reason to believe it wouldn't on my son's system. Creating a downloadable, bootable image to write to a USB stick is trivial. I suspect the major effort will be providing a tool that is capable of writing the image to a raw memory stick using a common, proprietary GUI file loader. >all the sob stories about everyone's shiny new server only includes >support for floppies and MFM disks and how cd's and netbooting just aren't >an option. I still administer two (P-1) boxes that can only boot from HDD or floppy but one is due to be de-commissioned Real Soon Now and I suspect an inability to run 7.x on the other one will not be a problem. BTW, when will FreeBSD support booting from punch cards, paper tape and uniselectors :-) [EDSAC bootstrapped from uniselectors] -- Peter Jeremy
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