On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, David Young wrote:
> I am mentoring a senior project group at UIUC.edu that is programming a
> 'cd9660' target for makefs(8).  I have described for them one use-case,
> which is privilegelessly building a bootable, "live" CD-ROM image
> for x86.  If you have additional use-cases, won't you send them to me?
> Use-cases that are very obvious to you, I have probably not thought of.

  * Install CDs, which may have
     + a kernel either inside a floppy-image (similar to what you set with
       mkisofs -b), or
     + just a loader (grub's iso9660_stage1_5 / stage2_eltorito) which
       will then pull a kernel from the CD (the 2.0 Live CD has/does that)
    The install kernel usually has a RAMdisk (md) with the most needed
    files (sysinst, ...), but would mount the CDROM for install files
  * A live CD that boots the kernel in either of two ways (as above),
    but that immediately mounts the kernel (config: root on cd0a or hd0?),
    and the starts things immediately? (The 2.0 Live CD documentation
    has a funny example of a mkisofs call for that, spanning over almost
    ten lines :)
  * Non-PC boot support would be VERY nice - MacPPC, sparc, sparc64,
    vax, ...; this may involve some nasty checksum tweaking (see
    src/distrib/cdrom and src/distrib/utils/sparkcrc)
  * A multi-arch CD to allow one CD to boot on several
    machines, and then pick the right loader/kernel/root-filesystem
    to start, before possibly mounting more filesystems (like install
    sets, which may be shared); again, see src/distrib/cdrom
  * Use as a tool to hook into src/distrib/cdrom and/or the release
    creation process to automatically spit out install CDs.
    Adding files like binary packages would be a big bonus!

If people are still bored after that, rewriting cdrecord/cdrdao may be 
some goal. (Or how do we intend to write CDs/DVDs?)


  - Hubert

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