Booting from floppy

[Eric W. Biederman]

"Phil Brooks" <PhilB at olymed.com> writes:

> We are interested in using LinuxBIOS on our medical system, running the Digital
> Logic P5 PC-104 SBC. After reading these posts, and scanning the FAQ, I am
> confused about boot methods:

The initial poster asked a bad question.  Booting DOS from a floppy
does not work.  Nor is it even a primary target.  But there is some
recent work in that direction.  And given that everyone assumed he
was asking about the recent work.

> Will LinuxBIOS work on a stand-alone system with a EIDE disk?
Yes.

> If floppy boot won't be supported, can it boot from cdrom?
There is a floppy driver.

To put it clearly the LinuxBIOS core does not really support booting
from anything except a ROM chip.  And it really only supports booting
a bootloader of some sort.  That said there are a number of interesting
bootloaders for LinuxBIOS that let you boot off of all kinds of things,
IDE drivers/network cards/floppies etc.   And as long as the support
is put into a bootloader and not the LinuxBIOS core it is even
encouraged for people to fill in the missing gaps.  

The various bootloaders are maturing and people are starting to find
LinuxBIOS useful so we shall see where it goes.

Eric