Diskless booting of Amiga

[Zac67]

The Deneb USB controller (A3k or 4k only, of course) can be used to load all required system software disklessly. For writable storage you could just add a USB stick. You could also use it to load any network drivers and continue booting from a share.

In theory, Kickstart supports any imaginable boot method through a suitable boot ROM - just like any bootable SCSI card.

[Zac67]

There are two different types of DOS devices: block devices with (usually) a physical structure underneath and a file system on top, and file handlers without, like a RAM disks or a network redirect. Take a look at the old mountlist entries and you get the main idea.

[Zac67]

@freqmax: A block device filesystem has little to do with a network filesystem.

@Mrs Beanbag: You could easily put everything you need for NFS into a RAD disk and reboot from that. No real need to make the device itself survive reboot.

[Zac67]

If you don't want to a 'boot from elsewhere but then stay resident and survive a reboot' scenario the Resident structure is useless.
You'll need either a boot ROM or a modified Kickstart with integrated drivers. Why not use a boot ROM with flash memory that's already there and easy to use?

[Zac67]

The RKRM chapter 27 pretty much explains it all.

[Zac67]

A fixed-sized RAD: is much easier to recover on boot because everything is in a single memory chunk.
A RAM:ish flexible device is much harder because you need to track down all the memory allocations and re-allocate them. This may also let you end up with fragmented memory directly after bootup.

[Zac67]

So RKRM - ROM Kernel Reference Manuals..
"Chapter 27 Graphics Primitives" seems wrong?

Yes, expansion.library has been in chapter 27 in the 2nd edition, sorry.