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Re: new oldworld pmac miboot 2.6 floppies, root size should be ok, net_drivers still too big, please test.



On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 12:08:23PM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
> 
> On Thursday, August 19, 2004, at 05:00 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
> >
> >>happy floppy disk reading noises.  However, the noises eventually
> >>stopped and a red "X" appeared over the TuxMac. Then nothing.  I 
> >>had to
> >>manually eject the floppy from the drive.
> >
> >What we need would be a way to get a log of it or something.
> 
> I'll try booting from open-firmware directly on a serial console.  
> It may take a couple of trys.  I've never done that before on a Mac 
> (On a Sun/sparc machine, it's standard operating procedure, and 
> I've got lots of experience with Suns -- so it's not completely 
> unexplored teritory!)  Maybe  there will be some console messages 
> that will be helpful.

Yes, that would be helpfull.

> >I have a
> >suspsicion that the pmac floppies being modular maybe one of the 
> >causes of
> >this, not sure though, possibly another modular important piece of 
> >the kernel.
> 
> Is the "swim" floppy driver compiled into the kernel?  (not 
> modular).  If not, the kernel may be unable to read the floppy 
> drive once it's been loaded by the firmware/bootblock code...

It is not modular in 2.6.7, but it is modular in the new 2.6.8 ones. I will
revert that though for the -2 upload.

> Are there any other drivers that must be compiled in?

Probably. The best would be to open the initrd, and examine the modules that
are in it, mmm Probably the filesystem modules are a good candidate for this,
what filesystem is used for the root floppy ? 

The root filesystem seems to be just a compressed initrd, which itself is
cramfs image, and cramfs is builtin the kernel.

> >It really is a kernel issue though, can you boot the 2.6.7 kernel 
> >with bootx
> >or quik ?
> 
> BootX works fine with 2.6.7.  I haven't been able to get quik 
> working (haven't tried very hard, since BootX works so well)

So, the kernel boots, but somehow fails to go beyond the miboot loading phase :(

> >Remember me what happened with the 2.4 powerpc-small based floppies ?
> 
> It's been a while, (March, I think...) but I think the sequence of 
> events went sort of like this:
> 
> TuxMac gives way to Tux icon at top of screen and scrolling kernel 
> messages.  Eventually it asks me to load the root floppy (but 
> doesn't eject -- so I have to eject manually) I load the floppy and 
> answer a bunch of questions ... etc.
> 
> I have the old March floppy images archived.  Would you like me to 
> burn some floppys from them and give them a try?  Just to refresh 
> our memories...
> 
> Can you make a boot floppy with a 2.4 kernel that installs a 2.6 
> kernel from the net/CD/whatever?

Sure, but it is not nice. I think you have to fall back to lower priority or
something such.

Friendly,

Sven Luther



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