At 10:48 PM 12/19/95, "The Great Mr. Kurtz " <davagatw@mars.ut wrote:
>If the idea is to have a booting partition on the hard drive, make sure
>it's on an external if you want to boot MacOS without a floppy or
>CD-ROM.  Then you can just switch off the external drive until halfway
>through the boot.  Chances are the finder will mount it anyway.  If not,
>just use any SCSI Probe style software to mount it.  Probably the better
>choice, however, is to just stick the boot stuff on a floppy with a
>minimal system (maybe without a finder) and MODE32 if necessary.  It's
>quick, it's easy, and it won't require any recoding.

But if you lose that floppy...

>That still doesn't eliminate the need for the kernel to be able to figure
>out the amount of real memory, though.  Also, I still say a
>compartmentalized kernel would be a Good Thing(tm)*.  Kind of making use
>of external hooks like the current MacOS.  Basically, if you need to
>upgrade the serial code, you'd release ModSerial31.  If you need to
>add support for a new module, of course, you'd still have to rerelease
>ModMain26.  However, users would still be able to keep that one patched
>ADB code module ModADB17 that happens to work on your system when none of
>the others do.  Although that make every system different, the
>functionality *shouldn't* be affected.  Basically, though, every user
>could customize his/her system using code for each section that work on
>his/her system.
>
>Thoughts, comments, suggestions, anyone?
>

That's one of the things I like about the mac.  But, it can turn int a
nightmare for us.  One, that's not standard BSD, is it?  Two, what about
code conflicts?  It is possible that a patch for say, the SCSI, decides to
use a certain hardwired part of RAM.  Ok, it works fine.  But then say you
add an ADB patch that just happens to load into part of the area that SCSI
code is using, becuase the SCSI patch wasn't as well behaved.  Well, with
each other overwriting the other, it would turn the kernel into chaos,
right?

However, i'd agree with this idea.

Shawn.

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