Re: Current kernel for Atari Falcon install?
On Tue, 5 Mar 2019, Eero Tamminen wrote:
Have Debian kernels really grown that much?
Hi Eero,
I've been looking into exactly this today. I compiled a kernel from commit
616d4cf8ea1c370198f548a7e84f1fe90b09921b (a bit arbitrary, it was the last
atari_defconfig commit) and tried various combinations.
I established the majority of dead ends I came up with were memory
related, but indirectly. The hang in BOOTSTRAP.PRG, filling the screen
with noise, related to kernels with an initrd, but mostly CPIO variants,
suggesting there's an overhead to those.
Dropping the initial ramdisk did mean the kernel started coming up, but
sure enough it ran out of memory quite early on in the process.
I'm currently in the process of building the lightest current kernel I
can.
Many years ago I tried Debian stable in Aranym with just 14MB of memory.
Kernel itself wasn't the problem, but Debian user-space was. After
logging in, there was only 1-2MB free RAM. Replacing Bash with
something leaner, removing *everything* from boot that's not absolutely
needed (logging etc), and building more minimal kernel config could
help.
Yes, I had a functioning install with a 2.x kernel, but yes, it was slow.
I can't recall if it was etch, potato or even earlier than that.
=> I would suggest preparing suitable stripped down / configured Debian
installation in emulator before trying it on real (16Mhz/14MB) HW.
Latest Hatari 2.2.x version in Debian "should" have good enough
TT & Falcon / 030 / MMU emulation to run Linux, and it supports
TT-RAM also with Falcon:
hatari --tos tos404.img --machine falcon -s 14 --ttram 32 --addr24 off
--ide-master <IDE image> <linux boot floppy image>
Yes, cheers. I've moved over to Hatari to carry out these tests.
Interestingly one of the old kernels gets further on Hatari than on my
actual Falcon when set up the same and booting from the same media, but
that's an investigation for another day!
If somebody can provide links to suitable images for latest debian m68k
images & kernels and short instructions how to boot them, I could
debug things a bit with Hatari.
A Debian 10 ISO is available here:
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/10.0/m68k/iso-cd/
Booting involves copying an appropriate initrd and kernel onto your HD and
running BOOTSTRAP.PRG, either taking its arguments from BOOTARGS file.
I've not investigated how to load the initrd into alt RAM, though, as I've
not resorted to that in Hatari yet.
Cheers,
--
David.
d.henderson.96@cantab.net
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