Re: Strategy for boot-floppies
On Sun, Jul 04, 1999 at 09:38:50PM +0200, Sven Rudolph wrote:
> Martin Schulze <joey@finlandia.Infodrom.North.DE> writes:
> > Since we are running into trouble we should face the truth and
> > discuss if it would be wise to split the rescue disk into a boot
> > disk and a root disk.
>
> IMHO this will have to happen.
That's just a short-term fix. As I said in other message our current
2.2.x kernel is >1MB. Soon it won't fit on a single floppy, and no
splitting will fix that.
[...]
> The RAM disk should be loaded from a file on the CD. Similiar as
> above, you don't need the NIC driver modules. But the SCSI drivers are
> needed to access the CD-ROM. (Currently SCSI drivers are compiled in
> the kernel. But it might be a good idea to move them to modules and
> adapt Debian to boot via initrd. An old project ...)
... that we must try to implement for potato. That way we may ship the
ever-increasing horde of modules in several floppies, and we'll be able
to support booting from floppies without having to reinvent boot-floppies
every new Debian release...
> Note that in both cases we assume that we have enough memory for the
> RAM disk. This requires more than 4 MB RAM.
>
> We could decide to require at least 8 MB RAM. (IMHO nowadays Linux +
> Debian is to big to be useful on 4 MB RAM machines.)
I agree. Anyone trying to install Linux with a 2.2.x kernel on a
4 MB RAM machine must use a custom kernel.
> With extra work (and a special boot disk) we could provide a 4 MB RAM
> installation: The initial root fs' job is to run fdisk and then
> cat/zcat the following root fs to hard disk. But IMHO this is a
> useless exercise.
IIRC, our current low-memory boot disk may be used for that. We just have
to tell the user to substitute the shipped kernel with his custom one.
--
Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
Reply to: