From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <32d987d50908271854u6da41079q26dc57984a2daffe@mail.gmail.com> References: <32d987d50908271854u6da41079q26dc57984a2daffe@mail.gmail.com> Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:23:52 -0700 Message-ID: <13426df10908272223u3c6238c8o404081a9620c6219@mail.gmail.com> From: ron minnich To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Subject: Re: [9fans] new 9atom.iso Topicbox-Message-UUID: 59506ff4-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Federico G. Benavento 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