On Sat, 16 Nov 2013, Patrick McCarthy wrote:
The ARAnyM kernel and initrd you posted unfortunately didn't work, I put
them in Penguin in 32bit mode and it hung at 'MacLinux ABCDEFGHIJK'.
I've built a Mac-only 3.12 kernel that you or Scott may want to test, just
in case the regression relates to multi-platform support (it's a long shot
though).
You can download it here:
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/~fthain/patrickjmc/vmlinux-3.12.0-mac.gz
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/~fthain/patrickjmc/kernel-binary-3.12.0-mac.tar.gz
$ md5sum vmlinux-3.12.0-mac.gz kernel-binary-3.12.0-mac.tar.gz
d793e70a017e701b92a83bec01af9fe0 vmlinux-3.12.0-mac.gz
e777a80956ee991c02fbeae361508906 kernel-binary-3.12.0-mac.tar.gz
I can't boot this binary as I don't have any suitable hardware here, but
the config is that which I've used for years (updated for 3.12).
This binary has all the relevant Mac hardware drivers built-in (and ext4)
and should be capable of booting from NFS, ATA over Ethernet, IDE, SCSI
(including CD-ROM) without needing modules. You can find the config and a
few modules in the tar file.
I uploaded the vmlinux file separately to make it easier to get the binary
on to your MacOS partition (for Penguin). Having booted that binary, I'd
normally then use wget or curl to fetch the tar file with the modules.
BTW, there is hope for a single-platform boot floppy, assuming more modern
data compression:
$ gzip -dc< vmlinux-3.12.0-mac.gz | gzip -9c | wc -c
1483905
$ gzip -dc< vmlinux-3.12.0-mac.gz | xz -0c | wc -c
1325352
I don't know how much memory is needed by the "xz -0d" algorithm. The xz
man page says "-0 is sometimes faster than gzip -9 while compressing much
better... -6 is the default, which is usually a good choice e.g. for
distributing files that need to be decompressible even on systems with
only 16 MiB RAM."
Finn