>In article <199511232125.PAA06202@solutions.solon.com>,
>Peter Seebach  <seebs@solon.com> wrote:
>> So, at that point, why not have a second floppy, which is a root filesystem,
>> and which has the smarts to build a link farm?  It only needs one link -

>Think about that for a second. What's going to contain the smarts? A
>binary? we'd have to have fat binaries then, which is a lot "heavier"
>than magic symlinks. Or were you going to have a shall script? Bzzzt...
>then you have to have fat binaries or magic symlinks to get the right
>/bin/sh anyway.

A shell script, using the init, sh, and few basic commands on the root fs
floppy, the way we do it now - except we'd have one more file on the floppy,
which would be the CD-ROM installer, smart enough to mount the cd and
refer to it "correctly".  Which doesn't need to be very smart.

(I speak only for the Amiga port with "the way we do it now", but my
impression is that several other ports have root filesystem floppies.)

A multiple boot CD is probably not possible.  A CD in ISO 9660 (nearly
good enough for most purposes) containing the native OS tools and
binaries to bootstrap would work.  (Not sure if it's possible or
desireable to partition.  If not, we have an even easier solution;
generic kernel has 1 or 2 vnodes, and we just put "instfs.386",
"instfs.mac", "instfs.amy" on the CD, mount them with the vnode mount
trick, and run from there.  Disadvantage, generic kernel needs
iso9660 and vnodes, advantage, very clean and easily tweaked.

-s