RE: new installer
Ok thanks. That was useful. With no possible way of kickstarting a cd can
be a bad thing. What about an ultra stripped kernel for 2.4 or 2.6 that
fits on a boot floppy. Then having it search for other boot disks and then
we can have the modules loaded how debian-installer currently has it so you
have support for all the nic drivers etc you could need. I do think that if
possible, starting up the machine with the ultra stripped kernel that has
multi fs support, could allow you to have it read from cdrom (/dev/hdc for
ex.) using iso9660 format and grabbing the initrd from another disk only
making it two bootdisks. So a command line example would be.
Boot: kernel root=/dev/hdc initrd=/dev/fd0
That would force it to load the kernel then ask for the other disk with
initrd to get the thing running. Issues with initrd is size. Im concerned
you won't be able to fit an initrd on a 1.44 mb floppy which would cause
issues. However if we get it to fit on cd, this plan will work great.
Dan Weber
-----Original Message-----
From: simon raven [mailto:simon@nuit.ca]
Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2003 8:13 PM
To: dan
Cc: debian-boot@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: new installer
Le Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 19:45:37 -0400, dan a écrit:
> Ok I think I see the overall picture now. Basically 2.2 and the old
> bf24 are the only kernels small enough to fit on a floppy. Booting
> from cds is not an option because that requires a proprietary
> bootloader. Are the following situations possible. Boot from floppy
> -> Quik -> use quik to start up Cdrom, or boot from floppy -> yaboot2
> -> use yaboot2 to kickstart cd.
>
> Dan Weber
>
here's a basic boot sequence on my box:
OF loads quik -> quik loads kernel (and initrd) -> system boots
this is done from boot drive. in my case it's /dev/sda2 &&
/bandit/gc/mesh/sd@0:0 is my boot-device in OF.
old installer did:
boot from HFS floppy & root.bin (which has a cramfs ramdisk in it) ||
kernel on a mockos partition & ramdisk.image.gz
now, excluding mockos booting (for various good reasons), the possibilities
are:
boot from floppy, using the old 2.2.x kernel -> ramdisk -> do install with
2.4.x kernel (i.e., boot from a 2.2.x kernel, but install a 2.4.x one). this
would be easy for a netinst. kludgy, but it works.
i don't see how you could use yaboot2 to 'kick start' the cd boot. unless
you formatted the CD in such a way where (probably what's going on now in
the current woody CD, i don't know) you have an HFS(+) partition, with the
contents of the woody boot floppy in it. but then you break newworld AFAIK.
current woody newworld boot is it has an Apple_Bootstrap partition, and has
yaboot and yaboot.conf in it IIRC.
one thing to note is that oldworlds booting yaboot2 will need an
Apple_Bootstrap partition, just like current newworlds do. that would make
things easier, but i'm 90% sure those won't boot from CD, for various
reasons, so you're still stuck with a floppy boot.
i'd suggest reverse engineering the mockos CD boot, and re-write the FCode
script so it'S (DFSG-)free. there are people that can do that BTW. you need
to be able to talk to the h/w ROM (BTW, for those that don't know, what the
distinguishing thing is about 'OldWorld' and 'NewWorld' is that the ROM is
encoded on a ROM chip in the oldworlds, and the new one has basic ROM, but
most of it is in RAM. or something =). the OW ROMS are like 4 MB, and the NW
are like 1-2 MB in size). well, i'm just ranting here now, but we need to
look at what we can do, and what we can't do. and see if we can turn the
'can't do' into a 'can do', while keeping it Free as in Speech. i'm aware of
the time constraints..
bootloader can be yaboot2 or quik, i'd prefer yaboot2, but unless the devel
gets help with it, that isn't going to happen. the bootloader doesn't matter
since a 2.4.x kernel won't fit on a floppy. and if you did make it fit, it
would be very minimal, and not good enough for an install kernel. so that's
why boot with a 2.2.x, but install a 2.4.x one.
am i talking outta my ass, or do i have something useful here..
--
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