At 04:08 PM 12/17/00 -0800, Matt Thomas wrote:
 > Thinking about this, I think the answer is two part: I don't think sysinst
 > supports tapes.

This I don't know, haven't munged around in the guts of sysinst.

>   And two, tapes don't use bootfs.  It isn't useful.

They used to. (in 1.4 that is) Perhaps the name 'boot.fs' is being abused 
here. There used to be a way to boot the ram-disk kernel from tape. Once 
that was booted you could newfs the drives, an unpack the distributions 
(also on the tape) on to those drives. What we need is the bootable 
netbsd.ram image with tape support in it.

>I don't know if the netbsd boot blocks support booting from tape.

They should, with Ragge's switch to using the RPB stuff for boot they 
shouldn't care what is feeding them data.

The investigation proceeds ...

--Chuck