the bootfs.paq with all the binaries is 1.5mb. and it has support for all the fileservers and network booting.
we just reuse the rc scripts and binaries that are already there and not trying to make up special solutions just for booting to save a bit of memory. and having self contained rc environment in the kernel is great as it lets you debug the hardware before you have a working driver. (or you can instruct someone to run some rc commands to troubleshoot a system without him having the capability of building a new kernel (because theres no driver yet)). instead of having half broken smarts in the bootloader (like passing half the partitions from loader to kernel) which needs to duplicate all the drivers, we can just do that with the kernels drivers and rc scrips. the kernel doesnt care how it got loaded. it gets to the same environment every time regardless of who loaded it. i can boot terminal that mounts the root filesystem over wpa encrypted wifi network and there are no hacks there. it just runs the same programs early that you would normally run from termrc. if you want to make a specialized low memory overhead kernel that will only work on your machines then you still can by specifying different files and /boot/boot in your kernel configuration. -- cinap
