Re: [9fans] new 9atom.iso

[ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Federico G.
Benavento<benavento@gmail.com> wrote:

> I could achieve the same as I did by doing "copy 9load E:" on windows
> with this new approach, but I'd need to boot some linux live CD
> and dd my way out to put the new loader there which I'll be too
> hacky and I'd probably need a version of prepdisk for linux
> on that live cd as well, if I got it right.

yep, this is a good point. It's the same reason that Peter Anvin
argued against using linux as a boot loader in place of grub or pxe or
whatever. There are simple standards on booting PCs, and if you
conform to them, you are more going to work in all cases. If you don't
conform to them, there are more cases where you can't work. Your Vista
example is a good case study.

So the FAT partition is good when you want to interoperate. But as you
point out, it's kind of 1/2 of a real fat partition, which means
sometimes, even if it looks ok in vista or whatever, it's not really
ok. It's not really possible to fit a true FAT file system handler in
a 512 byte pbs. The Plan 9 pbs (and I assume most of them)  are really
a "find a file by name, get the offset, and just start loading
contiguous data form whatever is at that offset in the partition until
done". That's why there are things like install_grub, or lilo, or
other such tools. If you delete and replace 9load and it ends up
discontiguous, well, you may not be able to boot, hence the need to
sometimes remove and replace all the files in the FAT.

There are a number of reasons to like using a plan 9 kernel to boot
your machine: drivers, native file systems, and so on. Interoperation
with vista is not one of them. It may well be in the long term that
the best way to remove 9load is to make Plan 9 grub-bootable.

But 9null is a pretty interesting experiment, all things considered.
And, it's there to hack. Grab the code and have it, maybe make it
better or fit what you want better or show us all a better way to do
things.

ron