>The Mac port has a booter application that runs under MacOS.  If all the 
>other supported architectures had a similar capability then a single 
>CD-ROM for all systems would be possible.  Although this is not much 
>different from the "boot floppy image" approach, it saves the user from 
>having to build the floppy from the CD and it could work on systems that 
>don't have a floppy.

Excuse me, but I genuinely don't understand.  What would a ``booter
application'' that runs under SunOS 4.1.x on a single-disk system look
like?  For Ultrix?  For VMS?  For HP-UX?  

On SunOS you at least have a hope of writing a utility that can unpack
a miniroot and put it into an `unused' SunOS partition, if you're
lucky enough to have one.


Sure, a wizard can use the ``drop NetBSD kernel into SunOS root
partition and boot'' technique.  (Binary emulation is so cool!). But
I've tried to sell this to NetBSD/pmax users, and *they* just don't
buy it, so I'm extremely skeptical.  So I don't think this counts.

But the others?  Could you explain what you're thinking of?

Would issues like requiring 512-byte blocks from CDs be an issue,
or not?