Re: state of boot floppies
Randolph Chung <tausq@debian.org> writes:
> Not sure when Adam plans to release 2.2.5.
As soon as feasible.... Hopefully Monday or Tuesday, the following
bugs may be RC but many of them can wait for 2.2.6 or greater.
> Over the past few days some of us have been testing out various
> builds of boot floppies on i386 to make sure it works and to iron
> out some remaining bugs. some observations:
Excellent work. I've been sick and a bit out of it, but this summary
helps a lot.
> 1. PCMCIA support is broken. drow said he might help take a look.
I've heard tell it works.
> 2. related to that, we don't have correct versions of pcmcia modules for the
> kernels used on boot floppies. I am not sure who the pcmcia-modules
> maintainer is.
The pkg to file the bug against is pcmcia-modules-2.2.14 (substitute
kernel version there). The maintainer is Brian Mays <brian@debian.org>.
> For now, you can use the debs at
> http://lully.debian.org/~tausq/unofficial-debs/. Because of
> modversions, the pcmcia modules must match the kernel-image you
> are using. This actually brings up a related issue, in that it
> is difficult for users to add their own driver modules if they
> need them.
That's what pcmcia-source is for, and kernel-package (modules-image
rule), no?
> 3. BenC was cleaning up dbootstrap a bit and seem to have fixed a net-fetch
> bug that was causing downloads to hang. I have one report so far that it
> works ok.
Good good.
> 4. The "Make Linux bootable directly from harddisk" option is not working at
> all right now. It seems to not write a lilo.conf or something. This has
> been reported several times and seems to be a showstopper for releasing
> 2.2.5. Also, when the machine reboots, the drives are not umount'ed
> cleanly.
BenC I think had hacked on this. I guess it got broke.
> 5. Support for DAC960/Compaq raid. Right now the boot floppies build scripts
> explicitly remove the device entries for these devices, so you cannot use
> them.
This isn't so... I only make it remove *some* of the device entries.
I believe we support a single dac960, drives 1-3 or some such.
> Erik Andersen has proposed adding makedev to root so that
> users can at least manually create the devices if they need
> them. This has been done, but not tested. (I'll test it if
> someone wants to donate equipment :-) The -compact kernels have
> dac960 and cpqarray support
> 6. The "small" boot floopies I mentioned earlier are now renamed 'compact' to
> be consistent with the package.. not sure why i didn't call it
> that to start with. In any case, it has been tested by several
> people and (other than the above common problems) seem to
> work. For those who missed what this is -- it's a kernel built
> with only the essential modules. i.e. no joystick, fbdev, etc
> stuff.
Cool. The kernel images are all uploaded, and either in Incoming or
else in the potato archive, right?
> 7. base-config : i've tried adding base-config support to boot floppies. Right
> now this is done by running dpkg-reconfigure base-config in
> /root/.bash_profile. It seems to work. This is not yet committed -- joeyh
> has some ideas on how he wants to run it through inittab directly. I'll
> let him experiment with it :-) People who have tried this so far seem to
> like it a lot.
Excellent. FYI, I'd rather do it via .bash_profile than inittab.
Busybox init is not so well tested and new and all that.
> 8. modconf seems to work with dbootstrap now and has lots of descriptions.
> I've heard it still has some problems and will try to track it down
> (#55404 and some that were reported to me privately)
>
> I think that's it. I've asked several people who have tested boot floppies
> to send their observations to this list. I think we are close, but the
> pcmcia and lilo issues definitely need to be fixed.
Excellent. Lets get the lilo bug fixed, base-config enabled, and I
think we're ready for 2.2.5.
Remember, 2.2.5 isn't itself a release candidate, but rather a version
which should be more or less feature complete.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
Reply to: