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Re: booting from a raid0 device.



On Sat, Dec 04, 1999 at 06:30:08PM +0100, Turbo Fredriksson wrote:
> I  really  need this.  I  have  one 100Mb  and  one  210Mb drive,  and
> partition  these drives serves  no point.  I managed  to use  the raid
> tools  and a  special kernel  to setup  the drives,  and  then mounted
> /dev/md0 on /target. Then I could continue the installation.
> 
> I have already begun working on the CVS source of the boot floppies to
> have this option implemented, but  there is one major problem. We need
> a 2.2 kernel, which there is no way to fit on one disk. Having all the
> SCSI drivers (and some other important stuff) staticly compiled in the
> kernel,  you will end  up with  a kernel  that is  about 950k,  and a
> modules.tgz that is about 3Mb (!). My first solution was that you have
> one boot floppy,  one root floppy and two  (!)  modules floppies.  The
> root/boot floppies could of course  be joined into one big 'CDROM boot
> disk'. Thing is, I don't like having a lot of floppies. To would be OK
> I guess, and  the modules.tgz could be fetched  from CDROM/NFS/TFTP so
> it is not THAT big of a problem.
> 
> 
> But before  I add to much  energy into this,  I would like to  know if
> there are any interest in this. 'Show me the code, or get it out of my
> way', right? I can do this, I just want to know if YOU guys want me to
> do it...

Without having spent too much time thinking about it, I would say that
adding support for raid0 may be just a special case of a bigger problem,
namely loading kernel modules before mounting the /target partition, right? 

I would like a solution to the bigger problem, not just having another
special kernel with more things compiled in (aghh, the bloat, the bloat...).

Also I am still not impressed with the idea of having separate boot and
root floppies. I still think that with a properly built initrd and a bare
bones kernel we may keep using just one rescue floppy and put everything
else on several drivers floppies. (I plan to spend some time on that next
week, when I finish this ... lab teaching season).
 
--
Enrique Zanardi					   ezanardi@ull.es


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