Re: boot diskette?

[David Eagle <DEAGLE@postoff1.promus.com> writes:]

> How do I create a boot diskette? Is this even possible? If not, when
>do we
>expect such a capability to be ready? In particular, I would like to boot
>off a 1.4M
>floppy.

Dave Hudson did this, and made some really elegant performance/caching
tweaks to the floppy driver.

>What would be really cool is if I could boot from a floppy on a
>floppy-only
>system with about 8M memory, decompress the entire floppy into memory, and
>(after allowing 3M for the expanded boot diskette and 1M for system data
>areas)
>have about 4M for user program space.

Sounds quite reasonable. You might want to enhance srv/tmpfs to permit
subdirectories. Or, you could run a filesystem on top of GNU zip on top of
the compressed data (but then you have to leave the floppy in the drive).

>Then, if I may continue my fantasy a
>moment,
>I would like that 3M of expanded bootdisk to contain ALL the normally used
>subroutines
>for GUI support, so that my programs can average about 40K each and still be
>user
>friendly.

Sure. And shared libraries reall help here, you'd just have to make a shlib
for your GUI. No problem, although you have to be careful how you treat
global data shared between clients and library.

>By the way, I do have ulterior motives for wanting a lean, mean OS machine.
> Will
>reveal in a followup.

So far this sounds like a pretty simple exercise. We look forward to
hearing about your plans.

                                                        Regards,
                                                        Andy
Received on Fri Apr 28 07:37:30 1995