Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!udel!mmdf
From: escd!es66!karl@decwrl.dec.com (Karl Rowley)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: ST Minix -- Mounting the hard disk on /
Message-ID: <5269@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 9 Nov 88 19:51:09 GMT
Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU
Lines: 29

ST Minix is a pretty impressive piece of work, and it works well with the
Atari hard disk.

For those who have 1 megabyte of memory and a hard disk, there do appear to
be some drawbacks to the system as it is distributed.  In order to load the
root filesystem from the hard disk, you must have a fairly small partition
dedicated to it.  Another partition is required if you want to keep /usr on
the hard disk.  Since the Atari software only supports four hard disk 
partitions, this leaves a maximum of two partitions for other purposes.

The hard disk is probably fast enough to make the ramdisk unnecessary in 
some situations.  At boot time it would be nice to be able to simply 
mount the root filesystem from one partition on the hard disk, and forget
about the ramdisk completely.  

Of course, one could use a ramdisk that was only large enough to hold the
necessary files for getting the system started.  However, the ramdisk would
still be mounted on / and the hard disk would still have to be mounted on
some subdirectory to /.  In this situation /tmp and /usr could not both be
on one hard disk partition.

What would have to be changed to eliminate use of the ramdisk?  Does such
a change require recompiling the kernel?

				Karl Rowley
				Evans and Sutherland Computer Division
				Mountain View, California
				...!decwrl!escd!karl
				escd!karl@decwrl.dec.com