Re: Everyone's SRM woes

[Alan Young <ayoung teleport com>]

Rich Payne wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Alan Young wrote:
> >
> > > EXT2 support in SRM is nice but whats stopping SRM from loading linux
> > > off a FAT fs of which it already understands?
> >
> > I thought SRM did not understand filesystems.  I thought it knew
> > enough about a device to pull physical blocks of media into memory
> > and execute the code from there... that's why aboot was written to
> > read the ext2 partition and load the kernel.(?)
> 
> It understand filesystems, but doesn't understand partition tables...if I
> remember correctly. After all it can read a FAT floppy, or an iso9660 or
> UFS CDROM.

Good point.  I hadn't thought about it that way.

 <snip> 
> > Well, how about _removing_ some of the more esoteric features of SRM to
> > stand-alone executables.  I'm talking about things like memexer, isacfg,
> > etc. that are nice but take up space and you don't need them to boot
> > the machine all the time.  ARC/AlphaBIOS was good for this as it had a
> > SDK that you can program with your own add-ons  (ARCDOS being one example).
> > The executables could be loaded from disk or floppy.  If those features
> > could be moved out of SRM and still being accessable (say on a bootable
> > CD) for those that need it, then you could put more enhancments into
> > the base SRM.
> 
> Hey....wait a minute here....you may not use those commands, that doesn't
> mean that other don't.

Please reread that paragraph again.  While I suggested some commands could
be removed from the ROM image to make space, I also suggested that the
removed commands still remain accessible via some kind of executable
format on CDROM or floppy.  That way no one loses. :)

 <snip>
> > I know you can't please everyone all the time.  And I know it
> > does boil down to money at some point.  It's too bad that at least
> > for video that the emulator couldn't be seperated from the console
> > in some way so people with old machines could at least update the
> > emulator.
>
> That's an interesting idea....seperating the emulator binary from
> SRM. Don't know it it's possible or not...they may be to tightly coupled
> for this to happen.

Thanks.:)  I don't know how feasible it is either.  Hindsight is
always 20/20.

Alan