Re: booting linux from two floppies
>>>>> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 12:16:45 -0800
>>>>> "NA" == Noah Ackerman <noah@nack.org> wrote:
NA>
NA> Are you getting a bunch of device full messages? You may need to specify a
NA> larger ramdisk size.
The initrd image is 8Mb, ~700K gzipped. But it does not matter, what
size it is: kernel does not even try to access the second floppy.
NA> On Tuesday 10 December 2002 08:33 am, Adam C Powell IV wrote:
>> Hello Sacha,
>>
>> My friendly AM (fall, 2000), it's nice to see you. :-)
Hello, Adam, nice to see you too.
>> Alexander Kotelnikov wrote:
>>
>> >Hello.
>> >
>> >While trying to make debian-installer working on alpha I faced a
>> >trouble: I need to boot from two floppies, one containing vmlinuz with
>> >aboot and second with some initrd.img.
>> >
>> >I boot kernel with load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1 and variations of
>> >noinitrd, root=/dev/{fd0,ram} but the boot process fails before or
>> >after kernel prompt for second floppy.
>> >
>> >So the question is, that wrong do I do?
>> >
>> The obvious thing to check: does the initrd.img fit onto a single
>> floppy? A lot of things tend to be bigger on alpha than other platforms.
>>
>> Otherwise, what kind of alpha and boot loader are you using? (SRM,
>> AlphaBios, etc.)
I am using SRM.
I will describe the process below.
*** keyboard not plugged in ...
ff.fe.fd.fc.fb.fa.f9.f8.f7.f6.f5.CPU 0 speed is 1.67 ns (599MHz)
ef.ee.ed.ec.eb.f4.ea.e9.e8.e7.e6.e5.e4.
Digital Personal WorkStation 600au Console V6.9-7
built on Oct 30 1998 at 14:10:45
>>>b dva0 -fl ''
(boot dva0.0.0.0.1)
block 0 of dva0.0.0.0.1 is a valid boot block
reading 174 blocks from dva0.0.0.0.1
bootstrap code read in
base = 1d6000, image_start = 0, image_bytes = 15c00
initializing HWRPB at 2000
initializing page table at 1c8000
initializing machine state
setting affinity to the primary CPU
jumping to bootstrap code
aboot: Linux/Alpha SRM bootloader version 0.9
aboot: switching to OSF/1 PALcode version 1.22
aboot: booting from device 'DVA 1 0 0 0 0 0 0'
aboot: no disklabel found.
Welcome to aboot 0.9
Commands:
h, ? Display this message
q Halt the system and return to SRM
p 1-8 Look in partition <num> for configuration/kernel
l List preconfigured kernels
d <dir> List directory <dir> in current filesystem
b <file> <args> Boot kernel in <file> (- for raw boot)
i <file> Use <file> as initial ramdisk
with arguments <args>
0-9 Boot preconfiguration 0-9 (list with 'l')
aboot> l
0:1/boot/vmlinuz noinitrd prompt_ramdisk=1 load_ramdisk=1 root=/dev/fd0 ramdisk_
size=8192
1:1/boot/vmlinuz noinitrd prompt_ramdisk=1 load_ramdisk=1 root=/dev/fd0 ramdisk_
size=8192 console=ttyS0,9600n8
aboot> 1
aboot: loading uncompressed boot/vmlinuz...
aboot: loading compressed boot/vmlinuz...
aboot: zero-filling 499656 bytes at 0xfffffc0000a32ba8
aboot: starting kernel boot/vmlinuz with arguments noinitrd prompt_ramdisk=1 load_ramdisk=1 root=/dev/fd0 ramdisk_size=8192 console=ttyS0,9600n8
Linux version 2.4.19-generic (herbert@gondolin) (gcc version 3.2 (Debian)) #3 Wed Oct 16 07:26:18 EST 2002
Booting GENERIC on Miata using machine vector Miata from SRM
Command line: noinitrd prompt_ramdisk=1 load_ramdisk=1 root=/dev/fd0 ramdisk_size=8192 console=ttyS0,9600n8
memcluster 0, usage 1, start 0, end 235
memcluster 1, usage 0, start 235, end 65535
memcluster 2, usage 1, start 65535, end 65536
freeing pages 235:1024
freeing pages 1369:65535
reserving pages 1369:1370
pci: cia revision 1 (pyxis)
On node 0 totalpages: 65535
zone(0): 65535 pages.
zone(1): 0 pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
Kernel command line: noinitrd prompt_ramdisk=1 load_ramdisk=1 root=/dev/fd0 ramdisk_size=8192 console=ttyS0,9600n8
Using epoch = 2000
Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
Calibrating delay loop... 1187.96 BogoMIPS
Memory: 513960k/524280k available (1421k kernel code, 8440k reserved, 522k data, 168k init)
Dentry cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 1048576 bytes)
Inode cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 6, 524288 bytes)
Mount-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 4, 131072 bytes)
Buffer-cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 262144 bytes)
Page-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 524288 bytes)
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
pci: passed tb register update test
pci: passed sg loopback i/o read test
pci: passed pte write cache snoop test
pci: failed valid tag invalid pte reload test (mcheck; workaround available)
pci: passed pci machine check test
pci: tbia workaround enabled
SMC37c669 Super I/O Controller found @ 0x370
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initializing RT netlink socket
Starting kswapd
VFS: Diskquotas version dquot_6.4.0 initialized
devfs: v1.12a (20020514) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
devfs: boot_options: 0x0
initialize_kbd: Keyboard reset failed, no ACK
keyboard: Timeout - AT keyboard not present?(ed)
keyboard: Timeout - AT keyboard not present?(f4)
pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with HUB-6 MANY_PORTS MULTIPORT SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI enabled
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 8192K size 1024 blocksize
Cronyx Ltd, Synchronous PPP and CISCO HDLC (c) 1994
Linux port (c) 1998 Building Number Three Ltd & Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak.
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP
IP: routing cache hash table of 8192 buckets, 64Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 65536 bind 65536)
Linux IP multicast router 0.06 plus PIM-SM
VFS: Insert root floppy disk to be loaded into RAM disk and press ENTER
VFS: Cannot open root device "fd0" or 02:00
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 02:00
The boot disk was created from debian-installer kernel:
$ cd debian-installer/build
$ KERNELVERSION='2.4.19-generic' sudo make build
$ mke2fs /dev/fd0
$ sudo ~/k2dva tmp/net/boot/vmlinuz
k2dva is a simple script:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
e2writeboot /dev/fd0 /boot/bootlx
mount /floppy
mkdir /floppy/boot /floppy/etc
cp $1 /floppy/boot/vmlinuz
cat > /floppy/etc/aboot.conf <<EOF
0:1/boot/vmlinuz noinitrd prompt_ramdisk=1 load_ramdisk=1 root=/dev/fd0 ramdisk_size=8192
1:1/boot/vmlinuz noinitrd prompt_ramdisk=1 load_ramdisk=1 root=/dev/fd0 ramdisk_size=8192 console=ttyS0,9600n8
EOF
umount /floppy
--
Alexander Kotelnikov
Saint-Petersburg, Russia
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