In message <20000708092241.H29907@eclipsed.net>, gabriel rosenkoetter writes:

>Thanks for the help, sorry for the dumb question!

Not a dumb question! Especially, as we should ask ourselves,
"How could the documentation have been clearer on this topic?"


[ Please try to excuse my anti- HOW-TO sentiment in the following
text ;-) I'm a believer in One Source(tm) for documentation. ]

>I actually tried this, but without properly disabling HIMEM.SYS. The
>only kernel I tried *after* doing so was GENERIC. The little beast is
>quite happy now (though it could do with a working battery).

1. Ah. While the i386-specific info to the diskless HOWTO,
   "http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/network/netboot/intro.i386.html",
   discusses HIMEM.SYS at this information does not appear to be in the
   dosboot(8) or w95boot(8).  This is an oversight and needs fixing.

2. It's not very clear about how HIMEM.SYS gets in the way; can you
   explain the symptoms and problems that you saw, please, so the
   documentation can be better updated? Can we improve the diagnostics in
   this case?

3. There's no mention of dosboot(8) in the INSTALL.* notes. This is
   an annoying omission.

4. Perhaps incidently, dosboot isn't available anywhere
   convenient. Ideally it should be in binary/kernel/ (or closeby).

>The documentation in the diskless HOW-TO on the web page specific to
>the i386 port is a little unclear about just which kernel it'd be a
>good idea to boot with dosboot, btw...

Ah, well, that's because the diskless HOW-TO is not for installation, per
se, but is for operating on a machine without a disk. That's not really
what you want.

Do you think the diskless HOW-TO was unclear in indicating what
it was intended for? Should the first paragraph be rewritten
or re-emphasized to clarify that it is not talking about
installation-without-a-floppy, but is instead talking about
booting-normal-netbsd-with-no-local-netbsd-disks?


I've numbered the points above that I think we need to fix.
Does anyone have any feedback on them, or suggested wording/implementation
text?

When this discussion dies down, all of the above should either
be declared irrelevent, fixed, or send-PR'd ;-)


Thanks for finding a lapse in the documentation!

--jhawk