Re: Dropping support for the smallest armel machines

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 4:05 AM, Chris Wilkinson <kinsham@verizon.net> wrote:

I increased the kernel zimage flash available to 4mb on an Intel SS4000E (iop32x) by reconfiguring the flash with fconfig, deleting the unused parts used by the stock firmware. This enabled me to upgrade the kernel to v3.2.

This does need serial console access as Ben says but that is true whatever kernel you want to flash.

This is true, what also is true is that without any tricks, you can compile on the box itself and get a normal sized kernel.
I am even running a 3.10-rc4 on SS4000-E with less than 2 MB for vmlinuz and initrd
Procedure (https://soltysiak.com/compiling-linux-kernel-for-ss4000-e-aka-lanner-em-7210-running-debian/) takes ages but it works and I can distribute working .debs if anyone wants.

After an upgrade to Debian 7 this stopped working and I had to do something (don't remember what at the moment, sorry) to make it compile, but after that it still works!

What I'm getting at is I think the large size is not just the kernel per se, it's the fault of the libc used.

Best regards,
Maciej Soltysiak

Chris
Sent from my Nexus 10

Aaro Koskinen <aaro.koskinen@iki.fi> wrote:

>On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 11:44:42PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
>> We have a recurring problem with building kernels for armel: three
>> flavours (iop32x, ixp4xx, orion5x) require the kernel image size to be
>> less than 1.4-1.5 MB in order to fit into a fixed flash partition.
>
>At least on Thecus N2100 (iop32x), the kernel partition can be increased
>to 2.5 MB by deleting a redundant partition used by the original firmware.
>This will however require manual actions from the user and access to
>serial console.
>
>A.
>
>
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