On Saturday, September 7, 2002, at 07:34 PM, Shawn Erickson wrote: On Saturday, September 7, 2002, at 01:22 PM, Bernie Zenis wrote: Operating systems seem to have a strong reliance on having dIsk(s) available. Can Darwin boot on a diskless system? What do you mean by disk? The OS has to be read from something and it doesn't have to be a "disk" in the traditional sense of the word. Hard disk, CD, DVD, ZIP, etc. Networking booting of Mac OS X is supported see... http://a160.g.akamai.net/7/160/51/48f6318de5a381/www.apple.com/server/ pdfs/L21951A_NetBoot_TB.pdf I've heard of netbooting but I don't know any details. Is nothing loaded from a local disk? That is, does firmware make a network connection and download the needed files? Does a netbooted machine still need a local writable disk? Can VM work over a network? Does Darwin need to have swap file(s)? If RAM is large enough, can everything happen over the network? Can Darwin continue to operate on a system where the disk(s) have become unavailable (gone offline, crashed, etc.)? If the "disk" that contains the OS image and more importantly the VM swap space goes away the system will most likely fail soon afterwards. That is the answer I was expecting. I just want to know how robust or fail-safe Darwin is. What do you want to do and how does it not require some type of "disk" to function. I'm mostly seeking knowledge. If Darwin can startup and run without a disk, then the whole Mac OS is closer to being able to do the same, then it might be useful to write Mac software that is "diskless friendly". I guess a better, more general question might be, "Can Darwin startup and run without a writable disk, local or remote?" Does any of this make sense to you or just to me? Thanks, Bernie _______________________________________________ darwin-kernel mailing list | darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwin-kernel Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.