Re: Minimal powerpc kernel, miboot users please test (Was Re: modularized powerpc kernel)

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 08:41:18PM -0700, Chris Tillman wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 11:42:22AM +0200, Gaudenz Steinlin wrote:
> > Am Fre, den 24.10.2003 schrieb Chris Tillman um 08:15:
> > > On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 06:14:29PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Aha! I got a working kernel. I guess I know more than I think I do :)
> > > 
> > > Here is the diff for the config, from your -small config. I really
> > > don't know which of these were essential, I ended up with only 59k
> > > free space on the floppy. But I guess that's enough.
> > For now it is. Altough I think most of the options you enabled are not
> > necessary. Could you test, if the keyboard also works for loading the
> > initrd when you only enable these two settings:
> > > -CONFIG_INPUT_KEYBDEV=m
> > > -CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV=m
> > > +CONFIG_INPUT_KEYBDEV=y
> > > +CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV=y
> 
> I tried several times to make kernels witha smaller set of options,
> but they all failed to boot, or else panicked after booting. I guess I
> got very lucky the first time. I'm sure we must not need IDE and SCSI
> drivers, but I didn't have any luck with the them left out.

BTW, the -powerpc kernel fails to boot on my pegasos system, but this is
probably due to devfs. Do you all run devfs with its cryptic device
paths, or is there some other trick to it ? The kernel stops after
having mounted the root partition, first it takes some time to do the
clock stuff, and finally times out, and then halts. I suppose this is
due because it doesn't find my non-devfs fstab or something such.

Which comes to another thing that worries me. I recently built a
2.6.0-test9 upstream kernel for x86, and devfs was clearly marked as
being obsoleted by udev, and the help stuff says :

  Note that devfs has been obsoleted by udev,
  <http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/>.
  It has been stripped down to a bare minimum and is only provided for
  legacy installations that use its naming scheme which is
  unfortunately different from the names normal Linux installations
  use.                                     

So i wonder if it really makes sense to use devfs for debian-installer,
have all the woody systems updated to use the cryptic devfs scheme, only
to have it be moved to something different again in sarge+1 or when
supporting 2.6.x kernels.

What do we need it for anyway ?

> I still had no luck with the 9500, either. The 2.2.20 kernel boots,
> but all 2.4 kernels give the same result: the video is not switched on
> in Linux. Many of the 2.4 kernels boot, I can type in my root login
> and 'reboot' blind, and the computer reboots. But they don't drive
> video. The 9500 is different from many Macs in that its video board is
> not built-in, but instead hangs off the PCI bus. This may have
> something to do with the problem.

Can you post a lspci output when running the 2.2.20 kernel ? This sounds
suspiciously like a missing fbdev driver for the graphic board.

Friendly,

Sven Luther