On Sun, 17 Dec 2000, Matt Thomas wrote:

> Thinking about this, I think the answer is two part: I don't think
> sysinst supports tapes.  And two, tapes don't use bootfs.  It isn't
> useful.
>
> How if i could only recall what ULTRIX boot tapes were like.  I seem
> to recall that they had 1 or 2 512-blocked files, followed by a
> 512-blocked kernel. I don't know if the netbsd boot blocks support
> booting from tape.

Gah, David Brownlee and I spent a really long weekend getting this working
under 1.4.1.  The details of it all escape me at the moment, but I
remember being saddened that the patches David submitted didn't get
included with 1.4.2 (and I presume 1.4.3).  Nor does it look like they
made it into the 1.5 branch.

We had to prune down the ramdisk size to get sysinst installs to work on
the memory restricted systems.  I think we could get standard installs to
work on 5MB systems, but with 4MB systems you had to manually mount up
swap space before you could get through the sysinst.

My systems still need to be dusted off and plugged in following my most
recent move :-/   I'm willing to work on putting something in place for
1.5.1 and the 1.6 branch.  We shouldn't neglect the more humble VAXen as
they lay at the very soul of BSD.

-brian.