How about a "boot file system" (BFS) then?  (a la SysVr4)

That way, the first stage program only needs to know how
to read the second stage out of the bfs, and the bfs is
specifically designed to make life easy for the ignorant
little first stage loader.  (Contiguous, no subdirs, ...)

It preserves the advantages of letting the second stage
program be large (and hopefully smart) whild the first
stage is small and stupid...

Ignatios Souvatzis writes:
 > On Sun, Feb 21, 1999 at 12:31:14PM +0100, drochner@zel459.zel.kfa-juelich.de wrote:
 > > As someone (cgd?) said: This is a battle you can only lose.
 > > You won't be able to implement nice features, and with every
 > > libsa or compiler change the trouble begins again. Or perhaps
 > > we'll get a working LFS one day, and want to boot from it...
 > 
 > This doenst' work with our 2-stage bootblocks.... they have block numbers
 > poked into them by the installboot, and block numbers on lfs arent fixed over
 > the lifetime of a file.
 > 
 > 	-is