Could MettaOS fit on a floppy?
informer2016 opened this issue · 6 comments
Even today the floppies are still being used, for example - as virtual floppies inside the coreboot open source BIOS. Just imagine: your wonderful OS could be a part of someone's BIOS build! (for coreboot supported motherboard, maybe you have or could get one - see https://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards )
If you already have a coreboot-supported motherboard, or a real chance to get one, - wouldn't it be cool to be able to launch your own OS straight from the BIOS chip? ;) With one simple command its possible to add any floppy to coreboot BIOS build - and then you see it as a boot entry! Multiple floppies could be added this way (as long as you have enough space left inside the BIOS flash chip, luckily LZMA compression could be used for the stored floppies to reduce their occupied size)
The current build should fit on a floppy just fine. There are even some fd0 images that are made for just that, an 1.44Mb floppy.
@berkus Thank you very much for reply! Please tell, why your latest official release (Metta-R925.iso) weights 9.8 MB (significantly larger than 1.44 MB) - is it because no compression is used? Also, it seems the floppies have been removed at R840 - c48cca1 I'm just trying to clarify the technical possibility of a floppy before trying to build by myself 😉
The .iso files are for CD-emulation, there should be a .fd0 image that fits on a floppy.
I'm not sure why I removed fd0 support in R840 - probably because I never used it myself.
@berkus Sadly there aren't many people who are interested both in coreboot BIOS and hobby OS, so I can understand you 😉 But I will be checking MettaOS from time to time just in case you'd restore .fd0
@berkus hope this could be re-opened one day...
You can build fd0 file yourself, just look at the script that generated it in the git history.