On Mon, 8 May 2006, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

> The CDROMs -- likely the most popular install media -- are the problem. The 
> El Torrito emulation section must be no more than 2880kb, and that's what's 
> overfilling now (ramdisk-big).
>
> It's been suggested that we forego the emulation, but older BIOS's likely 
> won't be able to deal with that.  I think the idea was to have a small El 
> Torrito section with just a bootloader, to load a kernel out of the ISO 
> image. Does the current bootloader support that? (Don't answer that. I just 
> built a current CDROM -- I'll try to load one of the compressed kernels right 
> now.)

So close.  "dev" and "ls" seem to be broken, by the way.  "boot 
cd0a:i386/binary/kernel/netbsd-GENERIC.gz" actually spins the CDROM 
(as does cd0d:...), but says "No file found...".  Was that supposed to 
work?

It occurs to me that anyone who wants to work on this might need to 
actually build a release, so again, what to toss out?  IMO, "bad144" 
stands out as the most useless thing on the list, and "bootfloppy" and 
"bootfloppy-com" just fit without it, but it's not big enough to buy 
us much time before this happens again.


Frederick