Re: [9fans] new 9atom.iso

[Uriel <uriel99@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 7:23 AM, ron minnich<rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

You try to present this as if using a Plan 9 kernel to boot somehow
precludes the use of the existing 9fat setup, this is not true, and
the whole point of the original GSoC project was precisely that: to
boot using a kernel without changing anything about 9fat and plan9.ini
so we could have a drop in replacement for 9load.

And given that such a setup would have all the advantages you list
here, plus would retain the advantages people enjoy from 9fat, it is
hard to understand why doing something else is such a great idea.

uriel


>
> 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
>
>