Phil Nelson <philnelson@attbi.com> writes:
> Other than having access to the "reset" button, a slip link and
> a serial console connection is all that is needed for kernel hacking and
> testing.  And I bet someone could really easily find a way to get
> a software controlled reset switch.

You don't technically need more than that, no, but...

We're moving pretty soon to a world where we do a lot more in the way
of automated builds and tests. We're about to get a machine that is
doing continuous builds of all ELF ports, probably with a snapshot of
every ELF port being done every single day. A logical next step after
that will be doing automated regression tests of each snapshot.

If you're doing cross builds on a pretty regular basis (say every day)
and want to do automated tests, it could take a whole lot longer to
download a full build over the serial link than it it would take to do
the build. It is also then pretty painful if it turns out some MI libc
hack someone did nuked your machine. It will work a lot more nicely if
we came up with a way to load up the image to be tested on the system
boot disk rather than attempting to download such things over a serial
line.


--
Perry E. Metzger		perry@wasabisystems.com
--
NetBSD Development, Support & CDs. http://www.wasabisystems.com/