Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 15:00:20 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: imp@rover.village.org (Warner Losh) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, pechter@lakewood.com, terry@lambert.org, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Boot file system idea! Slick Message-ID: <199707220530.PAA27322@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <E0wqXRZ-0002zQ-00@rover.village.org> from Warner Losh at "Jul 21, 97 11:25:04 pm"
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Warner Losh stands accused of saying: > > I know that the ARC BIOS MIPS boxes used exactly this approach. The > bootstrap was loaded from a FAT file system. That bootstrap then > loaded other things from either the FAT file system (if it was still > using the BIOS code) or from some other convenient location (if it had > enough of a driver to cope with the hardware). NT, I think, used the > raw device and groked NTFS where it loaded its drivers before throwing > away the BIOS. Trouble was, you needed to have a working FAT fs, or > you couldn't copy new kernels/boot code to the partition (OpenBSD/arc > has not boot loader, its kernel is in the right format). > > So I think it is a cool idea, so long as it isn't mandatory :-) The problem is that if it's not mandatory, there's no point in doing it. If we support reading from ufs filesystems anyway, there's nothing really gained from having FAT support. This is why I can't understand Bruce suggesting Yet Another Filesystem just for the bootstrap. > Warner -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control. (ph) +61-8-8267-3493 [[ ]] Unix hardware collector. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[
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