On Thu, 13 Dec 2007, Stephen Borrill wrote:
> > Another way would be to ensure that the boot loader on the floppy
> > was built with -DSMALL.
>
> Yes. The latter would mean building a different copy of boot though,

I haven't investigated how difficult it would be to use a different
version of boot for the floppies.  I see the attraction of one /boot
fits all media.

> >  We might even want a boot.cfg file to make
> >  "boot without ACPI support" a menu option.
> 
> Possibly, though at this point in time giving the option of "boot
> without ACPI"  would require two kernels to be present in the ustarfs!

I wasn't suggesting that!  I was thinking of having boot.cfg be able to
send a "disable acpi" command to the userconf editor in the kernel
(one day when that's possible), or ...

> Or we could just add a small boot.cfg which gives a welcome banner (or
> is even empty). Though that does seem to be increasing image size for
> little gain and also I like the idea of one /boot fits all.

An empty boot.cfg adds 512 bytes to the image (the fixed-size ustar file
header).  I think we could afford that.

> >  Issue C could presumably be fixed in ustarfs.  It could be clever and
> >  build a table mapping file names to volume numbers, or it could be
> >  stupid and just ensure that every open attempt searches through every
> >  volume before reporting failure.
> 
> I don't see that the stupid way would solve the problem except that the
> user would be prompted to reinsert floppy 1 prior to booting the kernel.

Prompting the user to change floppies would at least allow the boot to work,
though at the expense of some "unnecessary" floppy changes.

--apb (Alan Barrett)