>   | I notice, however, that the SCSI cd driver does not bother to read the
>   | actual label from the medium. You could try this:
> 
> Given that it never has, and that a change like that might have
> unexpected side effects (even if just mysterious complaints about
> not being able to read the label, every time someone accesses any
> "normal" CD)

I'd say that any error generated by readdisklabel() could just be
silently ignored, but that if a disklabel has been purposely placed
on the medium to specify the location of filesystems on it (in this
case a bootable UFS filesystem), it should be honoured.

So, one possible `unexpected side effect' might be that the sector size
in the label does not match the actual sector size used by the device.
A cleverly constructed label would allow this to be fixed by applying
a simple `geometry translation'.


> The "floopy image" for the CD boot doesn't have to bear any resemblance
> to a floppy, so it would be OK to make it huge (say 4MB!) so there's
> never going to be a problem fitting everything needed into it (only
> perhaps making it boot in sparcs with only small amounts of RAM).

You can't make it "huge" if you want to use the "floopy image" approach
since you're still constrained by the amount of memory available for
bootstrapping, which currently maxes out at approximately 3MB.

-pk