Mastodawn

Did UNIX/Unix tapes have live file systems to dump in or tree of resources to pull from? Or something else!

@dexter so yeah that's what 'tar' and 'pax' and 'cpio' were for. And for booting they'd typically boot the first stretch of files to an EOF/EOR marker on the tape, run that as the kernel; the kernel would then suck the next stretch until EOF/EOR into swap and boot that.

And yeah, I think sunos had mini-root that ran in RAM to format/partition a drive so you DID have swap. THen you'd boot it again from tape to do the install.

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Garrett Wollman Feb 20

@erikarn @dexter Worth noting that very few disk devices were actually supported in early Unix and the partition layouts were compiled into the kernel, so there was no need for (or possibility of) labeling. I believe the original BSD disklabel was invented by Robert Elz to deal with the proliferation of disks, especially on workstations with SCSI.

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Michael Dexter Feb 20

@wollman @erikarn I’m busy dwelling on the notion of installers vs. live media and thank you for the help in the “before my time” department.

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Garrett Wollman

@dexter @erikarn For what it's worth, all my FreeBSD installs use a live filesystem, never the installer. On the filesystem image I have a filesystem image (it's literally the same filesystem, modulo a couple changes to the configuration so it boots without network) which is then `zfs recv`d to the newly initialized boot pool. Some day I will write a proper unattended installer, but I've been cloning this way for nearly 15 years.