Re: MILO size problems
(Cc: back to debian-boot, debian-alpha, hope that's okay)
Christian Meder <meder@isr.uni-stuttgart.de> writes:
> On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 10:35:35AM -0500, David Huggins-Daines wrote:
> > Because we *need* to ship that version of MILO, I fear we'll have to
> > go back to my system of creating separate MILO/linload.exe images (we
> > can of course make them significantly smaller than 1.4M :)
>
> If we can't tweak our kernels to fit we've got to go that road.
Yeah - also see the bug I filed - we really should have the de4x5
driver compiled in. Actually I notice that my 2.2.15pre12 kernels
aren't terribly large (, and they might almost fit
I'm going back to the separate MILO disks (which are now 720k images,
since MILO is only 450k or so - it should work fine since FAT12 is a
pretty dumb filesystem). However, I've parameterized the set of
architectures for which we build rescue disks - the "small" set is
generic and jensen (because it appears that the generic kernel has
some problems on Jensen). If you want to build the full set, with
MILO on the rescue disks you can say:
make alpha_reduced_rescue_set=NO write_milo=YES build_milo_disks=NO
By the way, it *is* necessary to install the System.map, otherwise
procps and some other things complain at you.
> Is there anywhere a document on the current status of SRMs for the
> different subarchs ? Which platforms are still depending on MILOs ?
>From what I've been told, XL is the only architecture that has no SRM
available. I've put a pointer to the firmware updates page on
Compaq's website in the install documentation.
The cases where MILO is still useful are (and I guess this should go
in the documentation) where the user:
a) is dual-booting with NT on a half-flash machine
b) is dual-booting with NT from a single disk on a full-flash machine
c) is reinstalling onto a DOS-partitioned disk with existing
partitions
d) has a half-flash machine and doesn't want to reflash their
firmware (or has a full-flash machine and can't figure out how to
switch to SRM from AlphaBIOS :)
> > One other thing to mention: if we are going to provide
> > subarch-specific kernels (the only machine that really needs this in
> > order to boot is Jensen), then we should also provide kernel disks for
> > DP264 and Nautilus, particularly since I've added them to the list of
> > subarchitectures in the documentation :)
>
> The 2.2.14 alpha images were built by myself because Herbert didn't
I guess the bug that I filed against them (the de4x5 driver isn't
built in - it really needs to be) goes to you then :)
> build them for quite some time after the i386 release. DP264, Nautilus
> and book1 didn't compile so we left them out. Like I said above
Ah, yeah, nautilus and dp264 both need some patches, which will be in
2.2.15. But I would really rather go with the generic kernel only for
SRM boots (except on Jensen) because it saves a lot of space, and it
looks like we're telling people to recompile their kernel after
installing anyway.
For woody I'd really like to do something like Red Hat does where it
detects if your machine is SMP, except for alpha subarchitectures,
then installs the proper kernel after the initial boot (policy be
damned :)
--
David Huggins-Daines, Senior Linux Consultant, Linuxcare, Inc.
613.562.1239 tel
dhuggins@linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com/
Linuxcare. Support for the revolution.
Reply to: