Re: Options MEMORY_DISK_SERVER

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry%piermont.com@localhost>]

Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost> writes:
> On 02-Jan-2008 Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> It has no ability to read individual blocks into RAM? That's very
>> odd. If that's the case, how can you write something to boot off the
>> hard drive?
>
> Same trick.  It simply looks for the magical partition, and just
> reads the entire contents into RAM.  What it lacks is a callback of
> any kind to allow you to write a driver.
>
> AIX boots by just directly loading the kernel from this magical partition. 
> They don't even bother with a bootloader.

Okay, so the straightforward way to handle this is to load a libsa
based boot loader from the first "partition" on the floppy (or if
needed because you can't do partitioning on the floppy, from a first
floppy) and then read a tarfs. libsa already has a lot of the hooks to
do this -- you only need to write a polling floppy driver.

-- 
Perry E. Metzger                perry%piermont.com@localhost