Guys, If you look at the list of items, it starts to resemble the functionality of a real OS. This was Ron's insight with LinuxBIOS. Unfortunately, Linux is now too big to fit into most flash chips.
We tried here at UMCP using Red Hat's eCos, but it was too limited. The *BSD OS's are too large as well. Etherboot has been a good alternative, but as we look at adding more and more. It will become OS like...something it wasn't really designed to become. Ron played around with Plan9, and that seems to work. It also has much of the support asked for on the wish list already. What are people's thoughts about Plan9? Bill At 06:21 AM 5/20/2002, Justin Cormack wrote: > > > > On Monday 20 May 2002 5:56, Andrew Ip wrote: > > > > - Boot from floppy > > > > - Boot from IDE hard drive > > > > - Boot from SCSI hard drive > > > > > > - Boot from USB hard drive > > > - Boot from 1394 hard drive > > > > - Boot from 802.11B (which implies PCMCIA device booting - for my > hardware at > > least). > > > >I wouldnt do that without adding >-boot encrypted image > > > >The main issue seems to be that the number of ways of attaching media to >your computer has increased a lot recently. If you want to boot off any of >the devices people have listed so far (which doesnt even include serial ports >or modems or lots of other strange devices people might want to boot off), >you need quite a lot of OS. The average BIOS certainly doesnt attempt all >these in 256k, and many devices are expected to have their own boot roms >eg scsi. > >Justin
