Re: [9fans] pc boot and ether drivers

[jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 21:11:42 -0500, jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com
<jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com> wrote:
> It's mostly historic and most of the reasons have gone away.
> Sharing code with the current 9load code would be more trouble
> than it's worth. There are ideas for doing a better job by
> rewriting the bootstrap altogether, but who knows if/when it
> will ever be done.

By 'rewriting the bootstrap altogether' I would make it go away
altogether and use the kernel to boot another kernel. We can do this
already but some of the details are a bit messy and a tidy up and
re-organisation would be a good idea; this is likely to fall out
of something else I hope to be doing soon. How you get the first
(bootstrap) kernel into memory could be the same as now, using
whatever methods you like - Plan 9 MBR/PBS, Grub, LILO, LinuxBIOS,
PXE, whatever.

On Wed Nov 17 20:29:00 EST 2004, ericvh@gmail.com wrote:
> ...
> We have enough to do without having to worry about
> writing boot loaders.
> 
>           -eric

Agreed.

On Wed Nov 17 23:01:38 EST 2004, russcox@gmail.com wrote:
> the boot process is crappy enough.
> let's not make it crappier.

Agreed.

--jim