Diskless booting of Amiga

[Mrs Beanbag]

I don't know what is meant by a bootblock for non-block devices but you can definitely boot from RAD which isn't a block device.

NFS doesn't need TCP? Really?

[Mrs Beanbag]

RAD *is* a block device.

Is it? I wonder why. It doesn't need to be.

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.

Are RAD and RAM different internally then?

[Mrs Beanbag]

hm, RAD is arbitrary size though, I copied my whole workbench partition to it once. Elsewhere is telling me that it is a fixed size, weird *is confused*. The OS shouldn't need to know anything about the geometry anyway though.

Also it is possible to boot from RAM: as well, Toni Wilen did it once by accident.

[Mrs Beanbag]

it was an empty RAM disk, so it didn't need to be recoverable, but somehow mounted during exec/dos initialisation. I don't know the details. I think it was Toni Wilen. It was while developing the AROS 68k boot ROM so it might not have been exactly the standard RAM handler.

[Mrs Beanbag]

If you're making your own boot rom then you can cause any file system to be mounted.

That's the idea.