> I would like that the bootscript unpacks a tarfile form the disk like user.tar > and installs it from the rootdir. Then it can call user.s. > > So i can easey make a tar with my modules (ne2k,rlt3139,..). > If there are enough space free a simple mount,copy,unmount > make the disk spezial.
No, this is a very space wasting approach. The cost in space is not worth making something that is already possible easier. The design philosophy as stated in the FAQ and expanded on from time to time is: As much as possible on one floppy. Any time I have choices between making one thing easier or making another thing possible at all, the second will win. That is, I could write a lot of menus and make it easy to modify and write a customizer, and someone else would lose functionality completely. It turns out that filesystems are wasteful of space, that is the real problem. If *anything*, I would remove the *first* filesystem, and just stick the kernel and ramdisk on there. That would save space. And/or, I might want to modify the bootloader so that the body is more efficiently stored. Basically, the ideal is something like .archive.bz2 stuck right on the disk. Cpio is better than tar, I think because of the blocking, and maybe ar would be better still, almost certainly I would get gains if I designed a format just for space efficiency. The current minix root fs bzip2ed onto raw space and minix floppy root with the kernel is *already* wasting a lot of space. But, if I replaced the floppy root with a straight kernel, there would be NO place to modify easily, including rc.custom.gz and settings.s; and, if I replaced the minix.bz2 root with an archive, I would have to further modify the kernel and it might be a wash because the kernel would have to then be able to make a filesystem. Maybe the best would be to actually compile the root fs INTO the kernel- right now, the bzip2 (and formerly gzip) code is in two places- once in the boot loader, once in the ramdisk loader. If I loaded the root fs right with the kernel, I could delete the ramdisk loader bzip2 (or maybe the whole thing). But then it wouldn't be a normal ramdisk, or I'd have to get it into the buffer cache somehow sometime, I dunno, it might not be worth it. But, you get the idea, it is already *doable* to completely rebuild and customize. It will never be make *easier at the cost of functionality*. -Tom
