Ronald G Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov writes:
On 17 Sep 2002, ollie lho wrote:
IMHO, booting from kernel image on filesystem is more similar to what average end-user used to than booting from a boot partition. I have no idea if this makes it useful enough.
I agree with you here.
I also do. Ultimately putting kernels onto a filesystem that needs to be the interface. The question is what is the most maintainable route to get there.
I run on the assumption that for general purpose machines, I want to limit flashing the BIOS as much as possible.
For an embedded or special purpose machine it is not a problem to build everything to know your local filesystem and partition types. For a more general purpose configuration, it potentially becomes a support problem. Which is why I am leery of putting the entire bootloader functionality into the firmware. I definitely can not give every one beoboot for example because my largest customers disagree about wanting it.
Anyway this looks like time will tell we don't have so much development energy flying around that if we don't agree we will have 10 incompatible versions. We should be able to each use what works for them and then compare notes.
Interestingly enough the 9load program now understands the native Plan 9 file system, kfs. No more FAT partitions.
Nice. But has it stopped supporting FAT so all of the users who used FAT are in trouble?
Eric