Unix on CD?

[Greg Noel]

In article <8786 at sol.ARPA> ken at cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap) writes:
>Hmm. Unix system binaries don't change that often. What if most of
>/bin, /usr, /lib were put on a CD? ....
>Has this been done already? Or planned? Or too impractical yet/ever?

This was discussed a couple of months ago, in the context of various
plans for read-only file systems.

In article <10986 at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> verber at apatosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu
(Mark Verber) writes:
>The optical disks are still too slow for this to be practical.

If you insist that the file system be a "traditional" Unix file system,
then I'd have to agree with you.  But if you give me license to create
a file system with Unix semantics (think of accessing it via the file
system switch), then I'm not so sure.  With some careful advance planning
(remember, you can afford to do a lot of planning, since you only write
the disk once), I think it should be possible to get to any file with a
single seek.  This would make the access fast enough for a single-user
workstation, for example -- a half-second or so to load a program.

>If someone wanted to do this a good starting place would be the work done
>a BRL which permitted the root file system to be on write-protected disks.

BRL?  Do you mean the AFHQSC at the Pentagon?  (If so, that's pretty close;
they're only a few miles apart....)  BRL may have done it, as well, but I
think the first folks to do it were the Air Force.
-- 
-- Greg Noel, NCR Rancho Bernardo   Greg.Noel at SanDiego.NCR.COM  or  greg at ncr-sd