> I don't suppose the sun4c would support booting from an EXB-8200?  I'd
> much rather be able to boot and run from a tape than floopy.

Amen.  Mine all have standard 60mb tapes although my sparcstation1 has
a 150mb tape.  It sure would be comfy to be able to boot from that should
all else fail, like the jerk operator (me) nukes the root or such.

The late BSD ports to the sparc (4.4BSD) did not have any tape support
according to the SMM, so there is not much historical precedence there.

> ....do we have recipes for a standalone cp?  I think that's what we'd
> need, since historically on sun tapes we've had:
> 
>         0:      boot file, prompts for what to boot

I need a proper boot file source for the sparc sun4 architecture.
I was thinking of trying to use the sun3 stuff, since they should
be rather identical for the early sparc machines.

>         1:      Copyright/BOM/other garbage

Not needed on our boot tapes.

>         2:      Standalone cp for copying from tape:3 to disk:b or whatever

Not needed on our boot tapes.

>         3:      miniroot image

A small memory miniroot with the ability to format and partition the
disks, and dd from the tape for the miniroot to swap is all that is needed.
The less the better, IMHO.  Think simple.

>         4:      root filesystem
> 
> We can drop #1 unless we want to use it as a sanity check, and everything
> after the root filesystem is arbitrary.

Not much of a root fs is really needed, but, in the classic BSD sense,
a full root dump could be done.  That would be simple.

Then add  5:     usr filesystem dump

(and for purists, 6: var filesystem dump)

That would make a complete system easily,  and anything else could be
added from the stock tarballs after the two dumps were put in.
(I thought we did that back in the early 4.x BSD days, and earlier?)
Everyone is so bent on netboots, it really makes it hard for the poor
bloke with a dead machine and not a half a dozen local machines on the
home net.  I guess I consider tapes still the funadamental boot material.

> 				--*greywolf;
> --
> Sun could have remained quite profitable by staying with BSD-based OSs, and
> they wouldn't have pissed off NEARLY as many customers.

I will take a vanilla 4.3 bsdish install, anytime.  The rest is fluff to
be added later after the basic machine is up and running to suit.

Oh, well.....

Bob Keys