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

[Gaudenz Steinlin <gaudenz@soziologie.ch>]

Am Mit, den 29.10.2003 schrieb Sven Luther um 08:17:
> 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.
Did you set CONFIG_DEVFS_MOUNT in your kernel config? You don't need
that for debian-installer.
Normal installations should not run devfs at all (it will not be the
default for sarge) or use devfsd which takes care of compatibility
symlinks and permissions.
> 
> 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.
No system will be updated to devfs by debian-installer. Devfs is only
used during installation, not on the installed system.
> 
> What do we need it for anyway ?
> 
To see which devices are available to the kernel?

gaudenz