Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 10:21:51 +0100 From: nik@iii.co.uk To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Different kernels for the bindist and boot.flp? Message-ID: <19970918102150.17849@strand.iii.co.uk>
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[Not sent to -questions, since it's not a question about using FreeBSD, I *think* -hackers is the more appropriate forum for this] ObCaveat: I know very little about how "make release" works and the specific in's and out's of the install process. At the moment I'm just "thinking out loud". I've been thinking about installing FreeBSD from a ZIP drive recently. I'm in the situation where my home machine has (or rather, will have) no direct net connection. It will have a CDROM drive and a ZIP drive. At the office, I have a moderately speedy net connection and access to a ZIP drive. So I'm downloading the bin and src dists, will put them to a ZIP disk (actually, two, since I want to test installing from a UFS formatted ZIP and a DOS formatted ZIP). Other options (such as taking the machine to the net connection) are not feasible. I imagine this sort of scenario is reasonably commonplace (people like me at work, students with a fast university net connection but no connection to their machine, that sort of thing). Since I'm using SCSI, this will (should?) work painlessly. However, if I had an IDE ZIP drive it wouldn't since (as far as I know) GENERIC doesn't include the drivers shown at http://www.prism.uvsq.fr/~son/ppa3.html necessary for IDE ZIP support. Thinking about this, it occured to me it could be fixed by splitting the bin distribution into 2. The first chunk would contain almost all the existing bin dist, minus /kernel and /sys/i386/conf/KERNEL_NAME. These missing bits would be in a seperate distribution. As a user, installing FreeBSD would then be a case of 1. Download the bin dist 2. Download the appropriate kernel dist GENERIC_KERNEL IDEZIP_KERNEL . . . <- Other specific kernels, as necessary 3. Download the appropriate boot.flp image (generic_boot.flp, idezip_boot.flp, and so on) 4. Write and boot from the chosen boot floppy. The rest of the installation would proceed as normal, the only difference (in the IDEZIP case) being that the ZIP drive would appear as another (DOS or UFS) disk to mount, with the user using the "Install from another mounted partition" option (or whatever it's called these days). I don't think this is a small project, since it impacts on the release process and sysinstall (and, potentially, son-of-sysinstall). There are also issues over the lack of ability to logical-or kernel attributes together ("I'd like the IDE kernel components, the SCSI components and the ZIP components, but not the video-capture card components please" isn't possible). There are also documentation issues, since installing the system with this method (potentially) includes more for the user to remember. Before I start thinking about a prototype implementation, a) Has anyone else looked at doing something like this? b) Does anyone have violent objections to doing something like this? c) Does anyone have any insight on the best way to implement something like this? N -- --+==[ Nik Clayton is Just Another Perl Hacker at Interactive Investor ]==+-- '|' "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." (with apologies to Magritte) NC5-RIPE
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