Re: NetBSD wishlist

[Antti Kantee <pooka%homeworld.netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 12:17:26PM +0000, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> > Instant-on. The work done to reduce Chrome OS boot time makes a lot of 
> > sense, IMHO. Of course, many need to have more control over the boot 
> > process, but end users don't care. Also, instant-on after sleep is great.
> 
> I am one end user who cares, I need to be able to boot netbsd -a to select 
> the root device, since I have to boot indirectly using a disk image which I 
> boot using grub4dos, running under FreeDOS.

I guess he meant end users of consumer products built on top of
NetBSD.  Certainly nobody is going to take away your freedom to
boot -a ;)

> NetBSD can be installed onto a USB drive; I installed 4.0.1 onto a 4 GB USB 
> stick, might try with -current mainly to get a preview. With NetBSD-current, 
> I would need to be able to compile a custom kernel.
> 
> Live USB image should allow using the rest of the space on the USB drive.
> 
> I installed NetBSD 5.1 using the memstick image (adventuresome), can't boot 
> USB directly on my computer but booted with the help of PLoP boot manager 
> (http://www.plop.at/), which kernel in turn was booted using grub4dos running 
> under FreeDOS.
> 
> FreeBSD offers USB memstick images for releases now: include base system, 
> documentation, and live rescue file system.
> 
> I was hoping to copy the source .tgz sets to this USB stick, but 
> unfortunately the image was so set up to make the rest of the USB stick 
> inaccessible.  Also, since most of the content in this memstick image was 
> already tgz'ed, I think it would be better to make the downloadable image 
> available not gzip'ed; very little space is saved by gzip'ing.  But I think 
> this is the first time NetBSD has offered memstick image for installation, 
> albeit only for i386 and amd64.

The 5.1 memsticks were provided via manual labour because of high
user demand.  We're hoping to make it a permanent feature in the
future.  Any feedback you can give, especially as concise individual
send-pr's (e.g. "can't copy src.tgz to usb image" and "gzipping
memstick image brings little benefit"), is welcome.  As usual and
if possible, feedback with patches is even more welcome.  I think
Jared's "mkmemstick.sh" was used to generate the images.  I don't
know of a canonical location for it, but it's trivially found from
a search engine.


btw, thanks to everyone who has posted suggestions so far.  It
really helps to know what people consider worthwhile and strategically
important features.