A lot of CD-ROMs are now ide, and are hence detected by the kernel. At the
moment, when we do the first boot we use a combined boot and root disk. Could
we just put the boot disk bit on the bootable bit of a CD-ROM, so we get the
full a 1.44Mb kernel (plenty for anyone), and use the CD-ROM as the root disk?
That way there are hardly any size restrictions on the boot disk (1.44Mb is
plenty) or the root disk (How does 10Mb sound?). We could bloat the whole
thing as much as we want.
The main considerations have to be, people not installing from CD, people
using old or SCSI CD drives and the ultimate problem, the name of the cdrom
drive varies from machine to machine. Mine is /dev/hdc and my friends is
/dev/hdd.
The kernel detects them so it could be modified to hunt it out and use it to
boot from, but we would need a kernel guru.
$ dmesg | egrep "(hd|ide)"
ide: i82371 PIIX (Triton) on PCI bus 0 function 57
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f
hda: FUJITSU MPA3035AT, 3337MB w/0kB Cache, CHS=847/128/63, DMA
hdc: , ATAPI CDROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: hda1 hda2 hda4 < hda5 hda6 hda7 >
See, just pick out the first that looks like a CD-ROM drive and boot from that
(might this also work with SCSI CD-ROM drives?)
Part of the beauty is there would be no ram-disk so it could boot low-memory
machines. And the kernel could be a zImage rather than a bzImage, because
there is plenty of space, so it would boot on laptops. But we would still have
to keep the old stock of rescue disks for people that wanted them.
Just my 0.02 euros.
--
I consume, therefore I am
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