Subject: Re: Anyone know if tape booting works lately?
To: None <Robertdkeys@aol.com>
From: Brian Chase <vaxzilla@jarai.org>
List: port-vax
Date: 01/31/2003 21:42:11
On Sat, 1 Feb 2003 Robertdkeys@aol.com wrote:
> Anyone know how OpenBSD gets a good vax boot off floppy?
Ah, I'd forgotten. It'll take at least a small filesystem image for
this to work. I think what we ended up doing for 1.4.1 was to create a
somewhat less than 1.44MB empty file, mounted it as a device, labelled
it with first stage boot blocks, created a filesystem on it, copied over
the second stage boot loader (/boot), and then copied over netbsd.ram as
the kernel (/netbsd). Then inside the "netbsd.ram" kernel is a whole
other little filesystem image which gets loaded into RAM. I seem to
remember my brain breaking slightly over the weird nesting involved the
process of making the bootable image.
The best way to figure out what the OpenBSD folks have done would be to
look at their source code and release build process.
-brian.