Re: Net image far too big
On Tue, 2003-04-15 at 15:30, Martin Sjögren wrote:
> tis 2003-04-15 klockan 15.07 skrev Wouter Verhelst:
> > Op di 15-04-2003, om 12:35 schreef Alastair McKinstry:
> > > I think the single net floppy is dead, too, unfortunately.
>
> [snip]
>
> > > Because of all this, I recommend that we go to a kernel floppy + initrd
> > > floppy solution, with USB modules on the initrd floppy.
> > > This also should give us the space to have i18n in the net floppy case.
> >
> > I do think, though, that it would be better to provide multiple flavors,
> > then. I'm thinking of one 'minimal' netinstall-system which fits on a
> > single floppy, which supports most (but maybe not all) hardware, and
> > which does not support i18n; and a 'full-blown' floppy-set which does
> > support all of the above, but which does not fit on a single disk.
>
> Would it be possible to advance-ify our build process to build a single
> net floppy if possible, and go to two if not? Maybe it's a bad idea.
> Multiple flavours is nice, but not if we end up with too many!
>
Then we run the risk, that, if we fix a bug in one udeb, etc it may
cause the install to go from one->two floppies on some archs, but not
others ... fun keeping the doumentation in sync with that.
Maybe we could still do both.
The first floppy acts as it does now (when slimmed).
If this doesn't work, eg USB case, then the second acts as an initrd
disk.
Hmm. Is there a syslinux hacker available? Imagine the following:
Boot from first floppy. With priority == high, etc. it does what
autodetect it can. Realises it can't find net, USB, (or maybe it can,
but realises it hasn't got the right modules). Time to go to the
two-disk solution.
So it restarts the kernel (hide kernel output behind some nice fb
graphics), this time _with_a_different_set_of_cmdline args.
The shutdown() syscall can take arguments for rebooting with, but I
don't know enough of bootloaders on i386 to know to pass them and ensure
we boot with new args.
Ok, now we've rebooted, we can put up a different screen, prompting the
user for the second floppy. This is a 1.44 MB initrd, with all necessary
modules.
Can we do this, improve on this?
> > As such, our users can choose what they like most; and if you remember
> > that e.g. RedHat's netinstall floppy does not support graphical
> > installations[1], I don't think that would be a drawback when you
> > compare our installer to theirs.
> >
> > [1] At least not with 7.1 it didn't
>
> But they do support i18n on a single net floppy.
>
>
> /Martin
--
Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@computer.org>
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will reach to himself.
- --Thomas Paine
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