Re: 3.0.15 missing ne2k-pci module?
On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 04:02:23PM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> And how do you download without having the NIC driver? As said before,
> we have 2.4MB in NIC drivers. With the kernel a bit too much for one floppy.
Arrrrggghh! Why do you ignore what was written earlier?
I wrote:
are compiled into the kernel. But suppose we have a stripped-down
kernel with networking, tmpfs and as many common NIC drivers as will
fit compiled-in, but basically everything else non-essential (SCSI, IDE,
That is, a good selection of NIC drivers. The 'compact' kernel has a
reasonable selection even without making NICs a priority.
> > the availability of the network, since earlier in this thread you
> > proprosed installing the kernel-image package from the net!
>
> No. Only one guy assumed everybody would have an allways supported
> Realtek card (or what is the best-seller today?) and a fast network
> connection. This is just not true for many people, and (at least me)
> don't want to keep them outside.
You wrote:
But when Woody stabilize, the kernel installation routine could be
modified to get the package from the net and extract its contents. Then
the number of driver floppies could be rely minimized to only one,
containing NIC and FS drivers.
Which I obviously misinterpreted as proposing that the kernel installation
routine be modified to get the package from the net. However, the need
for a fast network connection (how fast? 28k8?) is a red herring, since
my suggestion _does_not_do_away_with_the_driver_disks_!!
> If you have only popular hardware, you may use the compact flavor, just
> three floppies. Or reiserfs, they are only few floppies too.
If you have a network and a popular NIC, you need only the the rescue
and root disks, since you can install the kernel and drivers from the
rescue and driver images over the network. And this is exactly what I
am talking about! Look Ma, no driver disks! And guess what? It doesn't
stop anyone who actually needs to load the driver disk from doing so!
(IIRC, Slink was even better in this regards, as the rescue disk alone
was often enough to get the network up and download the driver image.)
Of course, if you can't get the network up without any driver disks, then
you have to feed it the entire set, which is painful for most flavours.
Nevermind that most of the drivers are irrelevent to installation. Yuck.
So, to sum up my position: two disks is nicer than three and my
experiments lead me to think that most flavours could enable the network
with just two disks by squeezing a few more NICs into the kernel and
root disk, even if at the expense of bumping a few other drivers into
the drivers disk (yes, that may mean having the scan one or more drivers
disks before you are able to access the device for the target root).
And just maybe, a mini-initrd on the rescue floppy might be enough to
give some people with some popular system configurations the option to
load the root floppy image across the net instead of floppy, cutting
the number of floppies down to one.
I'm really tired of arguing this now. I still think it could work, but
feel free to have the last word.
> > Not as a provisional filesystem, just a temporary filestore for downloaded
> > modules. In fact, transferring the initrd contents into tmpfs and
> > releasing the initrd would use less RAM (just the instantanous size of
> > the tmpfs contents and virtually no metadata overhead) than the initrd.
>
> If you think, this is usefull, go ahead and present a concept. But ask
> Adam first.
Adam has already said Woody boot floppies will use a 2.2 kernel, so
no tmpfs (nor should blue-sky development happen to it at this stage,
anyway). I'll follow debian-installer once the Woody boot floppies
are complete.
Regards,
Mark.
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