Bill Studenmund wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Dec 1999, Simon Burge wrote:
> 
> > This is a sort-of-interesting point for another reason - at the moment
> > you need to be root to build a release.  What would be good is an
> > mtools-like frontend for FFS so that you don't need to create a vnd to
> > build the memory disk filesystem for the install kernel.  Hmm, do we
> > support root on an MSDOS/FAT filesystem?  There's nothing to say the the
> > install kernels that have a memory disk need to have FFS on them...
> > 
> > Of course there are other things like setting owner/group/perms inside
> > of the generated release tar files, but this shouldn't be too hard...
> 
> For an install kernel (a kernel using a memory disk root filesystem),
> you're right. I think there's been some interest in it. Like some variant
> of tar which would use an ffs as the output format.

Curious...  I don't recall anything recently on any NetBSD lists - do
you have a pointer?

> For boot floppies, usually you also need to install boot blocks. I'm not
> sure how well that would work without the filesystem being mounted from a
> vnd..

At least for the pmax installboot(8) works on a file as well as a device
- it just uses open(), pread() and pwrite().  I suspect this works ok on
the alpha as well, since that's where I pinched installboot from :-)

Simon.