2006/525: New Boot Sparc

[Jan Setje-Eilers]

> > In order to minimize the size of the ramdisk, in particular the 
> > install miniroot, which must reside in memory, the contents of the 
> > miniroot will be compressed. This compression is on a per file level 
> > and is implemented within the filesystem. In order to create 
> > compressed files a userland utility is used that simply compresses the 
> > file in place, the file is then marked as compressed via the 
> > _FIO_COMPRESSED (private) ioctl in the filesystem metadata. 
> 
> Do you like to implement the zisofs extension for Rock Ridge or does this
> apply to ZFS only?

 Funny you should ask. We'd like to, but we're still waiting for legal
review (let's please not discuss that here as neither you nor I can do
anything to sway them one way or another).

 If we get the green light we'll do this, which will involve the
corresponding change to mkisofs.

> > 5.4 Coexistence with other OSes
> >
> > The only other OS of note for SPARC is Linux, and they currently have no grub
> > plans.  SPARC / Linux boots from a loader called SILO, which already has a
> > grub-like menu facility.
> 
> I have no idea about SILO on harddisks, on CDs/DVDs, it is imcompatible to the
> Sun boot.

 I'd expect it lives in the boot-block of the slice, so assuming one
OS per slice it can co-exist as closely as it reasonably needs to.
More than one OS per slice assumes they can use the same FS as well,
which other than iso/hsfs is typically not something people would
expect to be able to do.

-jan