On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 02:26:43AM -0800, John Nemeth wrote:
>      I used to custom build CDs with a bunch of *VERBOSE options turned
> on (i.e. PCIVERBOSE), so that I could boot an INSTALL CD on some random
> machine and have all the devices properly identified.  I do have an
> open PR for this (dating back to before my developer days).  Now that

We should discuss this on a case-by-case base. I can somewhat understand
the reasoning for PCIVERBOSE, others are IMO a lot less useful. Just
because the size is not that tight anymore doesn't mean we should add all
options :-)

That said, I am perfectly fine with replacing INSTALL_LARGE with
GENERIC + ram disk hooks.

> we seem to have moved in the direction of not caring how big the
> INSTALL kernel is (which is going to be fun for me since not all
> machines I run NetBSD on are capable of booting from CD-ROM), I'm
> wondering about actually applying that patch?

Note that I didn't touch the INSTALL kernel, only INSTALL_LARGE and
the large floppy. One major reason for that is that the latter actually
has ACPI and getting that is more and more important to even boot.

Are those machines just not capable of booting from CD-ROM? In that case
using the DOS-based loader and providing a small FreeDOS image with ATAPI
driver might be good enough. Someone interested in working on that? :-)

Joerg