On Mon, 27 Jun 2005, Bang Jun-Young wrote:

> Will anybody be unhappy if i386/amd64 distributions are switched to
> native CD-ROM based installation from the current floppy emulation based?
> I'm strongly skeptical that there are users remaining who want to use
> floppies rather than CD-ROMs for installation on those ports (most
> i386/amd64 machines here in Korea are even shipped without floppy drives).
> CD-ROM drives are very cheap these days (~$12 vs. ~$5 floppy drives) and
> I can't find a machine without a CD-ROM drive anywhere.
>
> If we switch, the biggest advantage is that we don't have to waste time to
> fiddle with disk size limit on floppy install any more because the GENERIC
> kernel will be used for installation as well. Also, the distribution media
> can be used both for installation and the full-featured live file system.

 	As I understand it there are three size issues:

 	- space on floppies
 	  This can be addressed by splitting across more floppies, so
 	  should not be an issue on dropping floppy support.

 	- available space on 2.88 'emulated floppy' image for CD-boot
 	  For this, we can definitely drop the 2.88 floppy image version
 	  and replace with a native CD image, but this does not affect
 	  the 1.44 and 1.2M floppy image

 	- available RAM for memory disk
 	  If the CD-Rom install still uses an embedded memory disk this
 	  does not change matters at all. The compressed filesystem
 	  support (a 'la Linux 'cloop') could be a real win on this
 	  aspect.


-- 
 		David/absolute       -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --