On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Mike Smith wrote:
> In a very few cases, you'll find disk 'emulators' that offer BIOS
> interfaces to the emulated disk. These are rapidly declining in
> popularity because they offer very poor performance for Windows-using
> customers. They also typically fare very poorly or not at all under
> other operating systems, as they tend to require timer interrupts in a
> very hostile fashion.
I agree with your statement in general. However, in the "truly" embedded
PC world, the most popular off-the-shelf Flash Disk solution (M-Systems
DiskOnChip-Millenium) is actually of this type. However, this solution
also provides native drivers for Windows and a whole host of other OS'es.
If there isn't a FreeBSD driver available, expect one from me in a few
weeks.
However, in the "truly" embedded world, you generally do not want a
multiple-stage boot process. In fact, I have spent a fair bit of time
eradicating (sp?) most of the "unneccesary" multi-stage boot from the
PicoBSD stuff I'm doing for a product of mine. The idea of actually
putting a DOS "partition" on the system seems crazy.
> Please; take it from me that "booting DOS to boot another operating
> system" is so far beyond a joke in most situations that we don't even want
> to pretend in public that it's done, let alone talk about supporting it.
There is only one circumstance in which this might be acceptable, and that
is to support co-habitation with an OS which REQUIRES it's own MBR which
doesn't support dual-booting to a FreeBSD partition.
I can't think of any modern OS that works this way. And even if there
was, I can think of a million other ways to get around this than writing
a DOS-based loader. A few byte program which basically executes the
FreeBSD bootstrap program comes to mind.
- Forrest W. Christian ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) KD7EHZ
----------------------------------------------------------------------
iMach, Ltd., P.O. Box 5749, Helena, MT 59604 http://www.imach.com
Solutions for your high-tech problems. (406)-442-6648
----------------------------------------------------------------------
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
