On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 7:23 AM, ron minnich<rminn...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Federico G. > Benavento<benave...@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 > >
