/usr on USB

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 09:17:43AM +0800, John wrote:

> Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> 
> >I've never tried booting from a USB hard disk; I imagine the BIOS would 
> >have
> >to provide some emulation help, or else the boot loader would never cope.
> 
> Didn't you say you have a Powerbook? I am pretty sure that will boot 
> from firewire.

No, I don't, and I don't have a USB hard drive either.  I do have a USB DVD
drive, and a machine which can boot an Ubuntu install CD from it.  But this
is transparent to the installer up to a point; it doesn't know that it's
been booted from a USB device until it tries to mount it.

> >Yes, I think we may have inadvertently broken that with an optimisation.
> >I'll look into it.  NFS gets special treament, and is mounted later in
> >the boot process.  USB doesn't (and couldn't use the same mechanism).
> 
> Tried NFS over wireless?

No, and I wouldn't be inclined to try, given the throughput and latency.
Unlike USB, though, this is trivial to change; it's just a matter of moving
the firmware from /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware to /lib/firmware.

-- 
 - mdz