Recent tinkerings
Hi all -
I've been tinkering a bit with the boot floppies lately. Not that anything
useful has come of it yet, I've just dead-ended a few times (which I suppose
is better than not trying at all ;).
In a vain effort to save a few kilobytes of space, I downloaded a number of
base packges and modified them to build with only -Os for optimization
flags. It ended up being just that: such a miniscule amount of space it's
not worth it.
I've also been dabbling, trying to get a kernel to load its initrd off an
offset block of a floppy (ie one floppy has a kernel with rdev /dev/fd0, and
immediately following is an initrd image -- allows a two floppy rescue boot
-- Much additional space). So far this has not been fruitful, but I've
never dealt with init ram disks before.
Can LDLINUX.SYS handle initrd's?
My question is this:
When the boot floppies do use an initrd, what exactly will it be used for?
Drivers, yes, I know. But which drivers go on the initrd? My guess would be
any needed to access any controllers/media the user needs access to (and any
additional drivers needed for the install to work). In this case, what is the
best course to take after the initrd is loaded? Something like SuSE does
(autodetect)? Or will we rely more on user input?
TIA -- Aaron.
--
..Aaron Van Couwenberghe... ..vanco@sonic.net.. ..aaronv@debian.org....
Berlin: http://www.berlin-consortium.org
Debian GNU/Linux: http://www.debian.org
There are three kinds of people in this world: those who can count and
those who can't.
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