On 13/12/2010, at 14:06, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: > The result: I was able to get things like memtest86+ and DBAN to boot, > and very specific Linux distributions (with a lot of pain), in addition > to FreeBSD. However, FreeBSD would always fail to find the necessary > installation packages/sources/etc. due to "how" the whole booting > process above works. I had to spend a lot of time messing around with > MEMLINUX and the "map --hook rootnoverify (0xff)" parameters and similar > whatnots:
For just FreeBSD I have used syslinux to boot an MFS and then have sysinstall read off the USB stick as a hard disk. I submitted a few patches and they're committed now so you can probably do it out of the box. The only pain is generating the MFS but that isn't _too_ tricky. It would be nice if it was generated during the normal 'make release' though (hint hint) Also, I tried a minimal MFS and then loading the kernel directly from FAT32 using the loader but I could never get it to "see" the FAT32 even though by my reading of the code it should work.. -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C