[Coco] Boot flexibility in OS-9

[Allen Huffman]

On Sep 29, 2004, at 6:12 PM, Robert Gault wrote:
> not enough room left to add this kind of code to the boot module. We 
> would need to completely redesign the OS-9 boot process so that two 
> separate files were used. One to

Is there anything magic about the boot process that couldn't easily be 
replicated?  DOS only loads so much, then executes that, then that code 
has to do X, Y, and Z leading up to jump starting the kernel.  The 
downside is it would break compatibility with utilities that touch the 
kernel boot track, but the upside: No more making boot disks!  Heck, as 
simple as the file system is, at the reduction of boot speed there 
might be an alternative method that simply looks at a config file and 
retrieves specified modules from a holding directory (or, parses the 
bootlist file in real time during boot!).

Something like this is about the only way to make OS-9 "user friendly" 
-- hiding all of this from the user ;-)

If Apple could do it with FreeBSD, we should be able to do it with this 
tiny codebase.

		A