On Wed, Jun 30, 1999 at 08:48:30AM -0400, Kirk Reiser wrote: > Ideally, it would probably be best if there were some way of probing > and loading modules at installation time but I don't know how that > could be accomplished. This won't help. Having a scsi driver compiled in is smaller than the extra bytes the module occupies on disk. This will only help you if you are able to access the installation device without loading a module. We really should abandon the notion of the same kernel for installation and running. Good candidates that are not needed for installation are: - SysV IPC - any executable format other than elf - any filesystem other than ext2 and iso9660 - math emulation (we don't include this now, do we?) - SMP - BSD process accounting - quota - kernel automounter - sysctl support - network firewalls, routing, ip aliasing - scsi logging facility - verbose SCSI error reporting - QoS for networks - Unix 98 PTY support - sound - video for Linux - joystick support (the last three are already modular only, aren't they?) Barring bugs in the kernel I can't see a reason, why of two kernels, one with the above options and one without, only one could boot. All of these are software only. This reduces the chance for user confusion. Having the drivers for some old or rarely used hardware on an extra floppy that then needs to be inserted after loading the initrd could help too. It might also be a good idea to make a separate MCA installation disk. This will only need hardware available on such a machine, i.e. not that much, and cut down space on the regular bootdisks. The inconvenience to select another installdisk should be ok, taking into account that these are rather rare. Nils -- Plug-and-Play is really nice, unfortunately it only works 50% of the time. To be specific the "Plug" almost always works. --unknown source
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