Lets get rid of the floppy support:  It should be CD, PXE, or BIOS disk
    only.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@backplane.com>
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One thing to think about before chunking the floppy support is the 
discussion on the FreeBSD-stable list about the transition from Emulated 
El-Torito to Non-emulated El-Torito (or is it the other way around?).

Many of the newer BIOS implementations are supporting only the newer 
type, while the older BIOS only support the older type.  So DFBSD will 
need to either have iso's of each type, or provide a fallback mechanism. 
  Since older machines will generally have floppy, using floppies for 
that fallback mechanism makes a lot of sense.  That seems to be the 
consensus on the FreeBSD-stable list.

Something to think about.


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Define "BIOS disk".  I would like to be able to boot from a floppy to 
install.  The machine I have running dragonfly doesn't support booting 
from a CD at all....

Regards,
Galen

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How about making a (non-DF-specific) floppy which boots the rest of the 
OS from a CD?

I've seen (and used) a few Linux installs where we did this (via LILO) 
to boot from a secondary partition on a HD, when installing LILO to the 
MBR was not permissible.  I don't know how different El Torito is from a 
normal boot record, though.

Another option that I fancy is to use a Compact Flash card as a boot 
drive.  I don't have much experience with this; but I did have a 386 
happily booting FreeBSD without any HDs, only a CF card in IDE emulation 
mode.

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Mmm, that's a nice thing.  I should check out more of the Compact Flash
cards, see how easy it might be to whip up some generic support for
some.  We do have some support for certain brands already IIRC.

-- 
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(at)wxs.nl> / asmodai / kita no mono
PGP fingerprint: 2D92 980E 45FE 2C28 9DB7  9D88 97E6 839B 2EAC 625B
http://www.tendra.org/   | http://www.in-nomine.org/~asmodai/diary/
Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth...
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Good news: in IDE emulation mode, they look and act just like IDE 
drives.  You need an adaptor; I grabbed one for $20 (which, for a 
mass-market item, would be overpriced -- this is literally a few 
resistors and diodes, maybe an LED or two if you want to get fancy, and 
the hardware to adapt the form factors -- but, sadly, this doesn't seem 
to be a mass-market item).

I think that I did see some ATAPI messages from the Linux kernel when 
using it... no functionality was amiss, though.

http://www.acscontrol.com/Index_ACS.asp?Page=/Pages/Products/CompactFlash/IDE_To_CF_Ad... 
is where I got mine from.  If you're feeling more hobbyist-inclined, the 
(very readable) standards can be downloaded for free from 
http://www.compactflash.org/ .


However, in IDE emulation mode, you cannot remove the card; it tends to 
make the IDE bus a tad angry.  For that, you would want to use a normal 
card reader.

Dave

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This is a good place for IDE/Compact Flash adapter.  Pascal's moved back
to Switzerland though, so I have no idea what the shipping might be.
But check out the Wireless Router Board at $120!!!

http://www.pcengines.ch/order.php

Tim

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Speaking as someone who is currently installing FreeBSD on two rackmount
servers that are so full of disk there's no room for a CD, I'm not
hugely in favour of this move!

OTOH if you can netboot an install (and explain in words of one syllable
how to set that up ;-), I might be happy. Or is that what PXE is?

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff


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