Very slow booting and running and braindead OS's 4537

Modern USB or Firewire is a lot faster than what disks need, and they are designed for being hotswapped.

*n*x does not like "-" going away. This can be solved by having a "-" as a memory file system. But, you cannot boot from memory? Therefore, have "-boot" on a separate file system. This is where systems are loaded from; but you need not have it mounted once *n*x has started climbing into multiuser mode.

boot could also, thoretically, be a tape. A flash drive is a normal place to put it; it is around 30 MB on a full system.

You then need "-etc" to give the system it's personality, and the normal stuff. By the time most of "-etc" is needed the system is in multiuser mode and fully functional; and can run all kinds of tricks, including a mount of a newetc on top of a small, minimal one.

The real disks can then be under a volume manager (the problem is that only very special machines support booting from managed disks; but once Linux-BSD is up and running volume managed stuff is fully supported.)

So you can take 2 independent firewire disks, have them plugged in as different parts of the same mirror, and placeetc,home, usr,tmp,varlocal etc on top of the mirror.

Now, if you pull the plug on one of these firewire disks the system console will scream at you for a few pages, and then realise it has a broken mirror; and keep limping on.

Now plug in a new disk, run formatting etc on it, and tell the volume manager it is a replacement for the old mirror the system sulked about earlier. It will restore the mirror and keep chugging along. The system will stay running, and except for deterorated response times (especially during the mirror rebuild) it will work as normal.

USB network interfaces can work the same way. Traffic can be routed over a new interface without interruption.

-- mrr