Alpha bootdisk status

[Falk Hueffner <falk.hueffner@student.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Hi,

Herbert Xu has uploaded a fixed ash to incoming, so the crash problem
when installing modules will go away soon.

The alpha bootdisk generation is generally a bit crufty and broken, I
intended to clean up things a bit, but I have not much knowledge about
the different Alpha systems, I've only ever tried SRM and AlphaBios.

Here are my plans for the Alpha bootdisks:

* "kernel" floppy ("rescue" is a bit misleading here). Ext2.  Contains
  a generic 2.2.19 kernel. Bootable directly by SRM consoles via
  aboot. Bootable from other consoles via milo disks. Contains extra
  UP 1000 aka Nautilus stuff (how do UP 1000's actually boot?). Tested
  for SRM already. Mostly completed.

* 19 milo_$SUBARCH disks. Each contains a subarch-specific "milo", and
  a "loadlin.exe/ldmilo.exe", and has been prepared to be booted from
  SRM with "srmbootfat" (though using the aboot on the "kernel" floppy
  is preferable). The milo binaries will be downloaded from
  http://www.suse.de/~stepan/binaries/2.2-18/ with wget (I'd add a
  builddep). loadlin.exe/ldmilo.exe will be downloaded from
  ftp.debian.org, I don't know if there is any more 'generic'
  place. Problem here: "srmbootfat" is not available anywhere as
  binary. This is the only step that can't be made automatically
  easily: it needs to be extracted from
  http://www.suse.de/~stepan/source/milo-2.2-18.tar.bz2 and built
  manually. David Huggins-Daines has already written a script to build
  milo disks, I'll only have to activate that.

  Question: did I get it right that Ruffian needs ldmilo.exe and all
  other loadlin.exe? I couldn't find documentation on that...

  Note in the past we provided only milo binaries, but I find milo
  disks more convenient, and they can also be booted from SRM which is
  pointless for the install, but might be handy for rescue since MILO
  knows devices SRM can't access.

* "root" disk. Contains gzipped ext2 fs directly written to
  floppy. Barely fits now. Completed except for bug fixes.

* special Jensen and Nautilus stuff. I can't test this, I can only try
  not to break it.

* remove support for disks with special kernel images for the
  subarch's (except jensen and nautilus, which seem to be unable to
  run generic kernels). Would be nice if a kernel would fit together
  with a milo on a disk, but it doesn't. We also don't have those
  kernel images in the archive anymore.

* net boot stuff. I'll disable it until I get around to understanding
  it.

Well, I hope I can get a bit of feedback about this plan, especially
on the milo stuff and the intent to remove subarch kernel support...

        Falk