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Since Ingo and I started working on CD booting at BeGeistert, we have (or rather, he has) written a TAR file system for the boot loader.<br />When your IBM compatible computer boots, the BIOS emulates a boot floppy for a CD-ROM instead of giving you access to the disk directly. In order to access the whole disk, we need a CD-ROM driver - and therefore, we also need the kernel to execute the driver.<br /><br />Be's and our solution writes the kernel and all modules needed for booting from CD-ROM (or any other device unsupported by the BIOS) behind the boot loader to the boot floppy (ie. boot session of the CD). As on-disk structure, we use standard gzipped TAR files that contain all the needed files.<br />The boot loader will start the kernel from the TAR file, and the running kernel will then detect the CD-ROM and try booting from there - at least that's the theory. Right now, we have the TAR file system working in the userland boot loader test environment.<br /><br />Getting Haiku to boot from CD to the usual Terminal window is my first assignment as an Haiku Inc. employee. If no unforeseen problems arise, I hope to get it done today or tomorrow.