Re: Kernel for boot floppies
Vaidhyanathan Mayilrangam wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I met with joeyh during ALS and offered to work on kernel for the boot floppies.
> I got the kernel down to 355 KB.. From what I understood from joeyh, the new
> installer will be just the kernel and the network drivers.. However, one of the
> issues I have is that to read the network drivers, we need to provide support
> for the IDE and SCSI subsystems..
>
The initrd image is loaded by the bootloader, so some modules can be put
in the ramdisk image.
> Should those be a separate modules by themselves or should I try to compile them
> into the kernel itself? Then we will have two versions of the kernel, one for
> IDE and one for SCSI as we do now..
>
I think it would be better to have the one small base kernel with as
much as possible using modules (if possible).
It is a bit of a catch22 though, modules are bigger than the equivalent
feature built into the kernel, there will be a fair few MB of modules, i
guess it could be temptating to build some of the popular
drivers/features into the kernel, but then where do you draw the line.
If we provided an easy way for users to customise a boot disk to only
have the modules they know they will require then there will be enough
space in the initrd.
But then if the user cant/wont build a custom boot disk (extreme
newbies, cdrom installs) then they will be stuck with heaps of driver
disks, which is counterproductive to our efforts to get the installer
down to 1 disk.
> Further, does the SCSI support for NCRXX cards alone just enough ? I do not
> have a scsi machine and would appreciate the inputs..
>
I dont know about NCRXX, the scsi cards i have are aicxxx and a aha152x.
Also, are there many/any drivers that need to be compiled into the
kernel rather than being modules ?
Glenn
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