Re: Bits from the debian-cd team; more CD/DVDs being built regularly
On Sun, Dec 24, 2006 at 05:19:03AM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 22, 2006 at 03:04:54PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> >I'm looking further to see if it's at all possible to get (e.g.) hppa
> >and alpha to live in the same boot sector, but it's really not likely.
> Within sector 0:
> alpha
> =====
> bytes 000-<n> : ID string "Linux/Alpha aboot for ISO filesystem.". Looks
> like that could be modified if necessary.
> 480-487 : length of the boot image
> 488-495 : location of the boot image
> 504-511 : checksum of the previous bytes in the boot sector
> (otherwise blank)
> hppa
> ====
> bytes 000-008 : magic header
> 008-011 : location of kernel image
> 012-015 : length of kernel image
> 016-019 : location of ramdisk
> 020-023 : length of ramdisk
> 024-150 : boot command line
> 232-235 : location of kernel image
> 236-239 : length of kernel image
> 240-243 : location of boot loader image
> 244-247 : length of boot loader image
> (otherwise blank)
I just couldn't resist... :)
I've submitted bug #404986 against genisoimage which includes a patch that
lets hppa and alpha boot blocks coexist without clobbering one another.
Since the only conflict between these two blocks was a cosmetic one
(apparently the ID string from aboot is never displayed at all when booting
from SRM so it's hardly even that), this should work just fine.
So far, though, I've only tested it on alpha, not on hppa. If anyone would
care to give this a whirl and follow up to the bug report, that'd be nice.
I have a jigdo set at
http://people.debian.org/~vorlon/debian40-alpha-NETINST-1.jigdo and
http://people.debian.org/~vorlon/debian40-alpha-NETINST-1.template which is
an alpha netinst image, plus the kernel/initrd/bootloader for hppa; this
means it's not actually installable on hppa, but it should be bootable if
someone wants to give it a try and report back any results.
If this checks out and the patch is accepted, it should be trivial to tack
in ia64 or i386/amd64 as well, as long as space permits. :)
That's probably as many archs as it's realistic to squeeze onto a single
image. It would be interesting to know how OpenBSD got sparc and powerpc to
coexist though, since Steve's report says that powerpc wants all of the
first 12 sectors -- figuring that out might let us stretch this even farther
into the realm of the absurd ;)
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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