default media size [Was: Proposed F18 feature: MiniDebugInfo]

[Gerry Reno]

On 05/14/2012 08:15 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-05-14 at 11:49 -0700, John Reiser wrote:
>> On 05/12/2012 09:51 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>>> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:00:48AM -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
>>>
>>>> So the set of people we'd be inconveniencing is exactly the set of
>>>> people with no bandwidth and the inability to boot from anything larger
>>>> than a CD.
>>> Not only that - the people who have no bandwidth, the inability to boot 
>>> from anything larger than a CD and no USB ports that can be bootstrapped 
>>> from a bootloader sitting on a CD or floppy.
>>>
>>> USB has been required by Microsoft's logo program since 1999 and was 
>>> effectively ubiquitous on Pentium 2 before that, so the set of hardware 
>>> we're ruling out is at least 13 years old and more realistically 
>>> probably 15. We've already dropped support for x86 hardware that was in 
>>> production more recently than that.
>>
>> Reality can differ from the press releases.  I have two running machines
>> that contradict the conclusions above.  Instead of 13 or 15 years,
>> such an effective cutoff would be closer to about 8 years.  I consider
>> that to be uncomfortably young to be declared obsolete, especially
>> when the declaration is issued at the end of a release cycle instead of
>> at the beginning.
>>
>> The most important issue in this thread is ability to boot from USB2.0.
> No, it isn't. mjg59 wrote:
>
> "the inability to boot from anything larger than a CD and no USB ports
> that can be bootstrapped from a bootloader sitting on a CD or floppy."
>
> So you're talking past each other. You are assuming that direct boot
> from USB is the minimum. Matthew reckons bootstrapping from a CD or
> floppy is fine.

You can bootstrap from a CD to then boot from USB drives:

Example:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16822/boot-from-a-usb-drive-even-if-your-bios-wont-let-you/

.