If I may weigh in on priorities.....

I would think that networking and filesystems (MSDOS, ISO) would be top
priority items for the boot floppy, because I would think that the
main reason you'd be booting from floppy is for some sort of
installation.  The network drivers may be pretty important too, if on
a machine like one of my 7500s that has busted on-board ethernet.

Aren't there any "other" devices/functionality
that could be trimmed, like video (think "acceleration") drivers, or
tape drives, or sound, or ??? - things not interesting for installation??

If this is a late thought, already thunk, please ignore me.

-dgl-


>On Sun, Mar 31, 2002 at 12:13:43PM +0900, Izumi Tsutsui wrote:
>> Sometimes I used MSDOSFS via SCSI MO drives.
>
>Ah, OK.  That makes some sense.  Thank you.
>
>> Anyway, ustarfs support in -current could be pulled up,
>> but I cannot test it on 1.5-release branch right now..
>
>I'd rather not try to pull this up at the last minute since I don't
>have an easy way to test it (my floppy drive is not happy on this
>machine).  I'd rather just try to make things fit for 1.5.3 since
>1.6 will hopefully be coming fairly soon (1.5ZD, anyone? ;-).
>
>The problem that I can see is with the systems like the 6400 and 6500
>(I'm not sure what others) that don't have on-board ethernet, but do
>have the comm slot and a few PCI slots.  What chipset does the comm
>slot ethernet use?  What ethernet drivers do folks use on these types
>of systems?
>
>-allen