>Toru Nishimura wrote:
> Will NetBSD/pmax 1.4 distribution have ELF kernel and ELF kvm (ps and
> brothers)?

>KVM already supports all the bootable kernel formats.  

Acutally, 1.3.x may have done so, too.  Thanks to work on libkvm
mostly by cgd (for ecoff and ELF on Alpha).

>As for the kernel, we've still got a decision to make about how to best
>support all boot methods.  Ie, do we ship ECOFF or ELF kernels.  

We have to ship ECOFF for 1.4 anyway, for:
   * installation via netboot of a ramdisk kernel
   * installation via an NFS_mounted ramdisk  image
     (for hosts with buggy PROMs that cant handle > ~1Mbyte tftp)
   * hosts intended to boot diskless via TFTP after installation
     is complete.

all of these would be non-issues if we had a second-stage /boot that
could netboot ELF-format kernels, bypassing PROM bugs, but we don't (yet).

So, most regretfully, i think that argues strongly for installing
ECOFF (from kern.tgz and for ramdisk kernels) for 1.4.  But now that
we have Simon's spiffy two-stage bootblocks, anyone who wants can
install an ELF kernel for diskless booting -- gzipped, even.

>I don't think we have a final decision on that yet... However,
>booting from a diskfull machine, ELF will be the preferred kernel
>format.

Yup.  But for installation, life will be easier (and closer to the
spirit of release(7)) if we ship an ECOFF kernel in binary/sets/kern.tgz.
I dont much like it, but I can't argue my way out of that particular corner.
At least there's no reason to keep using a.out kernels.

If anyone has a counter-argument or -proposal, now is the time to make it.