Re: 2.6: future of UMSDOS?

[Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw@lug-owl.de>]

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On Fri, 2004-05-28 11:03:44 +0200, aeriksson@fastmail.fm <aeriksson@fastmail.fm>
wrote in message <20040528090345.6C6913F04@latitude.mynet.no-ip.org>:
> Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 10:19:09AM -0700, Mark Beyer - Contractor wrote:
> UMSDOS as-is, no not really, but I would like to see it ported to run
> on top of smb. Being able to have an smb equivalent to nfsroot would
> be really cool for disk space limited laptops and the like where you
> want to run e.g. colinux. All you'd need is a vmlinuz file, a small
> initrd file, and you're set to go. No need for
> filesystems-on-big-files and such workarounds...

Well, I've done something like that in userspace. For mass installations
(hundreds to thousands of machines with no interaction, while only a
Windows machine is available in each location ...), I boot off with
kernel + ramdisk (containing needed device nodes and the minimal set of
smbfs binaries to mount the server), then symlinking everything from the
servers into my ramdisk.

This approach is somewhat limited (eg. it needs to fit on a single
floppy for re-installing a totally crashed box) because smbfs binaries
are somewhat large (if you don't cut them down manually:), but it works,
at least for installation.

I guess that UMSDOS' approach *could* in theory be made to work with any
filesystem capable of storing plain files, but that'll need some work,
though:)

MfG, JBG

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