[ On Fri, June 14, 1996 at 16:43:38 (EDT), Gordon W. Ross wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: About options GENERIC (Was: Problems compiling current sources)
>
> You loose nothing with this situation.  You boot the tape,
> then use the RAMDISK kernel to load a miniroot into the swap,
> then boot a GENERIC kernel from swap.  At least, that's how
> "recovery from alternate media" works on the sun3.
> 
> It's true that you don't save much space by removing the option,
> so I guess its more of a philosophical thing...

So, I've always wondered about this too...  Why disable a really useful
function (i.e. being able to set the root to something arbitrary), just
to save a bit of code, esp. when it means forcing an extra step in the
recovery process?  I.e. why load the miniroot into swap and reboot again
when you could just tell the RAMDISK kernel to mount itself on sd0a, and
presumably the RAMDISK system has just enough capability to load a
kernel from tape/cd, just as it can load a filesystem image from
tape/cd.  This extra step has always bugged me with SunOS too.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734			VE3TCP			robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets Of The Weird <woods@weird.com>