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Re: And now for something completely different... etch!



Andreas Gredler <jimmy@g-tec.co.at> writes:

> On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 07:58:11PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
>> Andreas Gredler wrote:
>> > Is there a way to handle this? Could a kernel be patched to read data
>> > from multiple floppy disks? I know that this question sounds a little
>> > bit stupid, but floppies still seem to be the most reliable way to boot.
>> 
>> joey@dragon:/boot>ls -l vmlinuz-2.6.11-1-386
>> -rw-r--r--  1 root root 1170465 May 20 04:54 vmlinuz-2.6.11-1-386
>> 
>> Since d-i currently puts the initrd that reads the second floppy (or
>> other USB media) on the boot floppy with the kernel, we either have to
>> shoehorn that initrd, which is currently 644k, onto the same floppy,
>> reducing its size by 414k somehow. 
>
> I have to take a look at the initrd. 414k sounds much to me :-(

Intermittendly we had a multi floppy setup.

The first floppy contains the kernel and a minimal initrd. That
prompts for the second floppy and the user to press return and then
adds the contents of the 2nd floppy to tmpfs.

There was just one problem with it:
The floppy was to small to include usb keyboard support.


The best way to make multi floppy boot work would be to use initramfs
with a static C binary linked against klibc that does the prompting
and loading of the 2nd/3rd/... floppy. That way you can save as much
space as possible for kernel and modules (or similar with initrd for
2.4.x).

MfG
        Goswin



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