[woody-discussion] monte + detect
A couple of issues that might be worth discussing for the next
generation floppies.
detect
libdetect is the engine behind lothar, the mandrake sponsored hardware
detection program, it consists a list of pci, isa, and pcmcia devices,
when detect is run it scans the buses and matches the device id's up
with its database and can determine what kernel modules are required to
use each device.
It isnt perfect yet, it has some strange behaviour on my machine, and
the databases will take a while to fill out more... it shows a lot of
promise though.
The good thing about it is you dont need any drivers to detect what
hardware is on your machine.
Im not sure if its architecture dependent or not
Lothar and libdetect has been packaged by Dan Helfman, hes not an
official debian maintainer, hes looking for a sponsor.
http://www.internatif.org/bortzmeyer/debian/sponsor/
monte
monte is a kernel patch for x86 that allows a new kernel to be booted
from within linux.
http://www.scyld.com/software/monte.html
If this were used we wouldnt have to reboot in the installation process,
even if we install a new kernel.
It could also be handy as it could enable us to use the initial kernel
as a bootloader for later stages.
We could effectivly hold of installing the final bootloader as long as
we want.
monte + detect
I was considering the possibility that by combining monte and detect we
could have a special kernel with only the drivers required to read the
boot medium.
Its possible to get the kernel size down to around 300KB with a bare
kernel.
We could boot of this small kernel, detect available hardware using
detect and use the currently installed hardware as a basis for further
install options.
If detect discovered the machine to install on had low ram then it could
take a different install patch than high powered machines, rather than
having seperate install disks for each.
Or, if detect found some dificult hardware it could be possible to have
the installer take special steps to handle the configuration of such
devices.
Detect could deterimine the required modules for the machine and install
them automatically, or even compile a customised kernel based on these
configurations.... and then boot from the customised kernel.
With isa pnp in 2.3.x (and in 2.2.15?) initialising all those isa
network cards that i seem to have tons of will be a lot easier.
Has any other install process been able to build a customised kernel..
it may be a good goal to work at as the thought of recompiling a kernel
intimidates a lot of people, and yet is the best way to get your
hardware to perform at its peak.
It would take a lot of testing to get such a process working well.
Thanks
Glenn McGrath
P.S. I read the latest GRUB can do DHCP now.
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