On Saturday 05 July 2008, Joey Hess wrote: > Holger Wansing wrote: > > I tested this file on my good old i486 machine with floppy drive. > > Result: > > > > Loading linux.........................ready > > Probing EDD (edd=off to disable) ... ok [This is only > > displayed very short time] > > > > Then the machine reboots. > > This has something to do with upx. Replacing the kernel with a > non-UPXed version avoids the triple-fault. Of course, it also avoids > fitting the initrd on the floppy. > > Seeing the problem with all versions of upx (stable, experimental). I can create working images based on the pure upstream 2.6.25.9 (on which current Debian 2.6.25-6 images are based) using the same config and gcc-4.1, so the current hypothesis is that this must be due to a Debian specific patch or change in the kernel build system. I'll see if I can identify something. Working floppies based on upstream 2.6.25.9 available here: http://people.debian.org/~fjp/tmp/d-i/floppy/floppy-2.6.25-upstream/ Note though that installs will fail at anna because there are no compatible kernel udebs available on the mirrors. Other issues seen along the way. 1) Loading root floppy seems fragile For some reason the root floppy often fails to load, depending on which udebs are included (i.e. probably depending on size of the initrd). Only sometimes a floppy suddenly works. Most common failure is "Error extracting image (wrong floppy?)", but I've also seen a cpio error about unexpected end of data. As I thought the last could be because the initrd was just too big for the root floppy, I removed some udebs. This first resulted in a non working floppy with the "wrong floppy" error, but then _adding back_ a udeb by accident resulted in a working one. 2) Prompt for root floppy should discard extra input (rootskel) If I (accidentally) hit the up arrow before enter at the prompt (showing as "^[[A"), the init will scan for a root floppy multiple times. Probably once for each character entered. 3) ext2-modules udeb needed for i386 Now that ext2 is no longer compiled in for i386 we need a ext2-modules udeb in order to be able to load additional floppies. I'll commit that change later. The udeb of course also needs to be added to the pkg-lists for the root floppy. 4) Missing items in root floppy (load-floppy?) First of all I am confused. The floppy-ng target currently includes both load-floppy and media-retriever and /v/l/dpkg/info only shows load-floppy.postinst. But I cannot seem to find a source package for load-floppy in SVN anymore... Before load-floppy will currently correctly load additional drivers, I had to do two things from shell: - modprobe ext2 - create the /floppy directory (there is only the /media dir) 5) net-drivers floppies a) the pcnet32 driver (used by VirtualBox and IIRC qemu) really should be included on net-drivers-1 b) IMO it would be more logical to have nic-extra-modules (and usb?) on net-drivers-2 and wireless/pcmcia stuff on net-drivers-3; I've not checked how this would fit c) if a user initially loads only net-drivers-1 or 1+2 and then finds his driver is not available so goes back to load-floppy, we should try to avoid requiring that net-drivers-1 needs to be scanned again Cheers, FJP
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