On 10/29/06, David Laight <david@l8s.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 06:18:02PM +0100, Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:
> >
> > Now, the problem is that the boot-big.fs image is already at its limit
> > and it cannot grow any more because it'd not fit a 2.8MB floppy disk.
> > But as the Makefiles say, NetBSD cannot write such disks.  Given that
> > we already have the boot iso images (which replace boot-big.fs),
> > someone mentioned that boot-big.fs shall be removed.  And, for
> > simplicity, this is what I've done (well, not really yet).
>
> What I would consider is adding a 3rd boot filesystem that includes
> the extra utilities.  There is plenty of space in the ramdisk itself
> (since the limit is on the compressed kernel+ramdisk), so a different
> kernel isn't necessarily needed.

Sounds reasonable but... then the "ramdisk-big" is not any more the
"big" one... so what would we have, a "ramdisk-big-big" which contains
lfs and any other thing that may be required in the future?  We
already have a lot of installation images (in i386, at least) that
take a very long time to build; I'd rather not add another one if
possible (see below) and prefer to modify the existing ones.

> Possibly some of the 'tiny' floppies (etc) could be depracated, since
> they are sized for 5 1/4" floppies and 386/486 systems.
>
> The 'kernel+ramdisk' install kernels are very useful - since they can
> be netbooted, and I wouldn't want to get rid of them.
> I also think that new iso images do boot that sort of kernel.

Good point.  As long as there is no limit in the size that prevents
tiny improvements as this one, I don't mind keeping them.  It's only
that I bumped their size and then found that I'd not create a bootable
CD using them.  You are right in that they are useful for other
purposes!

> Oh, and the 2.8MB floppy is the limit for floppy emulation on a CD,
> not the size of a physical floppy.

So if we assume that (at least for i386) they ought to not be used for
CDs, could we bump their size past the 2.88 limit?

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84@gmail.com>
The Julipedia - http://julipedia.blogspot.com/