--- Alex Kirk <alex@schnarff.com> wrote:
> explanation for the HOWTO -- i.e., still detail what
> needs to happen, but 
> tell people *why* each thing needs to happen. I
> think that integrating the 
> two would give people the best chance to understand
> it. What say you? 

We had talked about this in the past, about the actual
boot process and making it easier to grasp for the
average user. I may have even started something on
that because I found it quite difficult to figure out
where to start using the diskless man page. I
eventually got the dreamcast netbooting, as well as a
sparc machine I have.

I think we came to the conclusion that it's quite a
big project to do something like that, and I'm
guessing it's already been done somewhere. Maybe not
in a NetBSD context though. You have this "layers of
an onion" thing along with some "chicken and egg"
problems as well when booting a computer.

I think we just left it as:

1. Computer hardware/firmware loads a kernel (or loads
a program that then loads the kernel in the case of
the IP upload slave, etc)
2. Kernel mounts a filesystem
3. System boots

1 and 2 are the ones where the very many permutations
exist depending on what hardware you have. 

Fun fun.

Andy

> 
> Alex Kirk 
> 
> 



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