On 25-Jul-2002 Terry Lambert wrote: > "M. Warner Losh" wrote: >> : Think "CDROM install". >> >> Dude, what crack are you smoking? How many times to we have to tell >> you. We have a boot loader that knows how to read the kernel from the >> cdrom or scsi or whatever. IT is a tiny increment to also load >> additional modules at that time that support those devices. What's >> the real issue? > > So, given that the install from a CDROM boots from a floppy > image that's faked up by the CDROM drive BIOS, and the image > doesn't include the full boot loader, how exactly is it that > the partial boot loader code acts like the full bootloader > code for accessing the CDROM to load the modules necessary > to access the CDROM?
Actually, we do use the full bootloader for floppies. For CD-ROM it would be a bit tricky to load drivers off another floppy due to i386 BIOS, but we have that problem on other arch's anyways (e.g. alpha SRM). However, you can always do that later once the MFS root is up and running. CD-ROM's are completely different from floppies anyways. On all of our arch's we now boot a loader directly off the CD that has access to the entire CD's contents. (On i386 we use cdboot to do this via the El Torito no emulation mode.) The only place this isn't currently true is that 4.x releases don't use cdboot on i386. (IMO we should have starting with 4.6.) Alpha has since at least 4.5 IIRC. Thus, the only people who even need modules in the mfsroot or on a driver floppy are those doing an install booting from floppies (such as FTP installs). -- John Baldwin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <>< http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
