Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 11:46:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org> To: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@nsu.ru> Cc: cvs-all@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/release/alpha drivers.conf Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1030515113251.19892L-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <20030515152805.GA63529@regency.nsu.ru>
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On Thu, 15 May 2003, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote: > On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 09:22:49AM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote: > > On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 08:39:30PM -0700, Jon Mini wrote: > > > Robert Watson [rwatson@FreeBSD.org] wrote : > > > > I think they'll be needed for i386 for a while yet, but when it comes to > > > > the newer 64-bit platforms, I tend to agree. I don't even know if you can > > > > buy a sparc64 box with a floppy drive at this point... It's hard for > > > > me to imagine anyone shipping an ia64 or amd64 machine with a floppy > > > > disk drive but without a bootable CDROM... > > > > > > The last time I used a boot floppy was over a year ago when I had > > > made some changes to the boot code and needed to make sure it still > > > worked for floppies. > > > > > > I can see the argument for supporting floppies on i386, but future > > > platforms don't require it. I think that these days it is harder > > > to find a floppy than a blank CDR, but then maybe that's because I > > > have an Apple laptop. > > > > > Not everyone has a CD-R/RW burner, you know that? I'm more > > in a mood to remove the support for modern drivers from BOOTMFS > > and driver floppies, assuming that if one has a modern enough > > hardware she also have a CD-ROM drive. Killing functionality > > like this would just decrease the number of potential FreeBSD > > installations (not to say users). > > I second this. Floppies are going to be in use for quite a long time > just yet. Lots of people prefer to install from FTP while booting from > floppies to save the disc for something more useful than bootstrap > platform for one-time installation. Note that the discussion here has to do specifically with the 64-bit platforms, not i386. The current strawman proposal being discussed is: i386 Floppy install support indefinitely due to floppy drives still shipping in most machines. alpha Deprecate floppy support, if we can't demonstrate an interest in the FreeBSD-alpha community for the continued use of floppy disk installs, as this would improve our ability to support Alpha releases in the future. sparc64 We don't currently support floppy disk installs; make an intentional policy decision not to support them in the future. amd64 We don't currently support floppy disk installs; make an intentional policy decision not to support them in the future. I don't know what the current status of floppy installs is with ia64, and what vendor plans are for ia64. Nothing would preclude re-supporting floppies in the future on these platforms if it became desirable -- the floppy disk device drivers aren't going away or anything, of course. But by not supporting them in the short term, we save a lot of time commitment by the RE team to just making drivers fit on floppies in order to get intermediate snapshots out the door. As the number of floppies also increases, we start having to deal with usability issues -- do we want to force every user to put in every floppy? If not, we need a way to determine what floppies they put in, but that's complicated in that you have to put in the floppy to load the device driver to know if you need the device driver... i386 may inevitably require a long parade of floppies, but there's no need to burden the newer platforms with that until it proves highly desirable to do so. Or to put it another way: if you spent $7k on an ia64 server, the chances are you have a CD burner. Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects robert@fledge.watson.org Network Associates Laboratories
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