> It's actually not a primary bootstrap. It's really very similar
> to the SunOS 4.X secondary bootstrap, which in and of itself
> was a miniversion of SunOS. The rationale for this was that it
> needed to have NFS and a whole IP stack for diskless clients,
> as well as 'dozens' of disk drivers.

No, it's not that either.  It's meant to be firmware, at least on some
machines.

As such, it _needs_ those kinds of drivers, etc.

> A secondary boot that has all of this stuff in it is justified,
> in my opinion, when you want to be able to do things like load
> a primary/secondary from one media and boot or run diagnostics
> from another. Since MILO sorta does this, it has some merit.

Perhaps.  In my world, i'd like the firmware to provide a reasonable
set of disk, network, etc. access methods to the boot blocks.
Therefore, a boot block shouldn't need the drivers (though it does
e.g. need file system code and networking code).


Unfortunately, the SRM console provides the functionality, but it
makes it sufficiently hard to figure out the device name for devices
other than the booted device that it's not usually appropriate to try
and do anything with them.  However, it's certainly possible.  I've
just not yet found the need... 8-)


chris