Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 09:25:07 +1000 From: Duraid Madina <duraid@octopus.com.au> To: "Cliff L. Biffle" <cbiffle@safety.net> Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Floppy Support Message-ID: <3EB44FD3.30601@octopus.com.au> In-Reply-To: <200305031509.19473.cbiffle@safety.net> References: <3EB3C118.6020203@octopus.com.au> <200305031509.19473.cbiffle@safety.net>
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Cliff L. Biffle wrote: > On Saturday 03 May 2003 06:16 am, Duraid Madina wrote: > >>Can anyone give a *good* reason why floppies should still be supported >>from this point onwards? > > > 1. El Torito. Last I checked, under emulation, 2.88MB was the largest boot > image available, so fitting the bootloader/kernel/etc. onto two floppies is > still quite significant. We could use El Torito's "type 4" hard disk emulation. Installing FreeBSD from such an environment seems a little gross, but religiously mangling kernels to fit onto 1.44Mb floppies seems worse. > I've only run across one machine that could > competently handle non-emulated CD booting. Time to update those 486s. The El Torito spec is dated January 1995, you know. ;) > 2. Servers without CDROM drives. As another poster mentioned, 1U rack or > clustering servers frequently don't have CDROMs. I know mine don't. Fine. PXE boot. What sort of sick f!#ker adds a floppy but leaves a CD out, anyway? And if you're missing both, surely it's somewhat less painful to walk around with a USB CDROM drive than to walk around with a pair of boot floppies? > I'm still confused as to why the $CVS$ tags are going into the kernel on the > floppies, but that strikes me as minor. :-) Indeed. Duraid
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