Re: trimmed down rescue/root/driver disk sets
> Personally, I think it wouldn't be bad to have a set of kernels
> available to install with. It seems rather a big bite to chew using a
> single kernel that is expected to support many different
> configurations. IMHO, the present kernel is already too bloated and
> inadequate for use in a production system.
The problem as I see it is this -- the bulk of the current kernel is SCSI
stuff. We can have non-scsi vs scsi boot floppies, but that doesn't seem to
make too much sense, because the scsi floppies would need to have some
support for ide probably anyway (for atapi devices and such). If we do not
manage to compile rescue and root onto one floppy, there's really not much
reason to have multiple set of boot floppies, as it just creates more
maintainability problems.
> I think it is a good idea to stick with multiple driver disks since
> incorporating drivers into the kernel for the sake of minimizing the
> number of disks is not worth further convolving an already convoluted
> situtation.
Um, just to clarify -- I've managed to trim down the number of driver disks
by eliminating esoteric/unneeded drivers from the kernel, not by compiling
more things in. There's no reason to have things like sound, radio net
cards, v4linux, etc stuff in our kernel.
> Another possibility would be to offer the option of using
> driver disks on an individual basis with driver groupings based on
> typical configurations. In my special case, it would be nice to be able
> to skip the driver disks completely since I don't need to load any.
I thought you can do this already?
I am still experimenting with this new setup. unfortunately, because
perl-5.005-base is still broken, i haven't been able to build test images
yet. If you want to try building bf using the new kernels, grab the debs in
http://master.debian.org/~tausq/boot/ (kernel-image and pcmcia-modules) and
put them in your local_dir (/archive/debian/local by default iirc) and those
will be used in place of the stock kernels. you should end up with only 1
driver disk. The kernel build config is in that directory as well. This is a
stock 2.2.13 kernel with the ide patch applied, and support for hpt366
devices turned on.
Here are some relevant statistics (i386):
file size
drivers.tgz 1025576
linux (kernel) 912716
disk space available
rescue 459k
root 1.1M (compressed, so may be off)
driver 437k (compressed)
randolph
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Debian Developer <tausq@debian.org>
http://www.TauSq.org/
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