Re: Booting VSTa

Tommy Thorn wrote:
>
> I'd suggest either porting LILO to VSTa (fairly easy?) or using
> a similar scheme.

This is certainly an option - in fact it's what I was almost certainly going
to do until a couple of days ago - it may still be a good way to do things.

>
> > 1. Invent a new boot file system type - very simple, with limited if any
> > subdirectory handling.
>
> I could suggest "tar".

I'd like a tarfs too!

> > [...earlier ideas deleted...]
>
> Please explain to me why this would be much better, than just running
> something lilo-like when you would otherwise had reorganized the files
> in your bootfs?
>
> /Tommy
>

Hmm:

For a LILO image I need something like the bootable image I use for floppy
booting. This has very little overhead (spacewise) when there's only the
one boot image (about 300k currently for all of my boot servers and the
microkernel itself). For each new image however we start adding a further
300k. This probably isn't too much of a problem on a hard drive, but I also
like to have a general system maintenance floppy and I don't think I would
want 2 or more images on a floppy. Under Linux with all of the device
support in one 400k compressed kernel I only need one kernel image, but I
soon run out of space doing this with VSTa since the kernel and boot servers
are loaded below 640k. My floppy loader can just squeeze 572 kbytes into
this space so I'm only going to be able to add 6 more boot servers before I
have a real problem (the problem gets worse if the library code linked to
each server gets much bigger - until we have shared libs).

Additionally, every time a server is modified we need to remerge a bootable
image and rerun the "LILO" installer (although if everyone's prepared to
accept this it could be done as part of the server's makefile).

A boot fs of the type I described before only requires only one copy of each
different server binary on the entire system (so it saves space), and
thinking about it, it should be possible to make it automatically update the
boot loader's sector map if it physically moves on the disk (gets rid of the
shutdown util objection I hope)

I suspect I want to run VSTa in a somewhat atypical way since I run lots of
differently configured systems. I'm still a little concerned that I don't
want to create something that's completely [345]86 PC specific, and I'd hope
that a boot fs concept would be portable to other architectures (maybe I'm
showing my ignorance here though).

Regards,

Dave
Received on Tue Jan 11 01:50:04 1994