----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Rauch" <rkr@olib.org>
To: "Ian Zagorskih" <ianzag@megasignal.com>
Cc: <netbsd-advocacy@NetBSD.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 9:13 PM
Subject: Re: A random thought.


> On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 09:35:03PM +0600, Ian Zagorskih wrote:
>  [...]
> > > I was just noticing that the price of 256MB solid-state non-volatile
> > > memory took anotherp plunge (down to about $50).  I was thinking about
> > > the notion of putting a NetBSD install on one of those things.  (This
is
> > > fairly idle, since I don't really have a need for such a toy.  It'd
really
> > > be a waste of $50 for me right now.)
> > >
> > > Then it hit me: A few years ago, a single CD-ROM had a multi-boot CD
> > > that would install NetBSD on any of several platforms.  Maybe we are
> > > close to a single memory card being able to boot multiple hardware
>  [...]
> >
> > ATM i already have NetBSD fine booting and working from USB Flash Disk.
It
> > eats about 4Mb of total 64Mb. There's no problem to make an installation
> > distro for such disks. So you'r not alone thinking about NetBSD on solid
> > state disks :)
>
> Ah.  Now, can you boot multiple CPUs/archs from one flash disk?  (^&
>
> (The problem that I don't know about solving is simply getting
> different boot blocks to work.  CD's apparently have a convention
> for this, but I assume that solid state disks do not look like CDs,
> even if write-protected and bootable, so...there remains a problem.)
>

Well, AFAIK there's no standard for multi-CPU boot loader for umass devices.
I saw this feature only for ISO9660 & K CDROMs. On x86 USB Flash Disk used
through BIOS looks like a floppy disk you boot from. Bootloader loads kernel
from "floppy" and here's umass enters the game.

Anyway, if you don't need multi-CPU boots USB Disks are just fine. And they
are quite cheap for reasonable size 256..512 Mb. One of the main advantage
is that you can wrine on the disk so it can be used as a long time personal
work system.

// wbr