On Sun, 21 May 2000, Anders Magnusson wrote:

> Some news:
> 
> I have lately done some quite extensive changes to the boot system.
> The goal was to use RPB to send info from the booter up to kernel, and
> to use rom routines to read the boot program from disk in the boot block.
> The result is a boot block with filesystem support for FFS, CD9660 and
> USTAR (tar) and a small standalone routine for Massbus disks. All this
> occupy less than 7k :-)
> 
	Wonderful! :)

> The boot program now uses the RPB info for booting if it is autobooting,
> so that it is possible to boot even from unsupported devices.
> 
> And last, I also wrote a standalone device driver for the DEUNA/DELUA
> Unibus ethernet cards, so if someone wants to boot their 11/750 it is
> now possible to do the installation from a single TU58 and run the 
> machine netbooted :-)
> 
> A consequence of this is that the old kernels cannot boot with the new
> boot block/boot program. New kernels will complain a bit if they are booted
> from an old boot program.

	Would it be possible to have old kernels working with the new
	bootblock, even under an 'ifdef OLD_BOOT_INTERFACE', which would
	be retired sometime after the 1.5 release. It wouldn't really
	matter if they could not get the boot device and had to always
	ask...

		David/absolute
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