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Bug#738765: boot.img in daily image files exceed 10mb limit



On 02/19/2014 01:21 AM, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Re: Bug#738765: boot.img in daily image files exceed 10mb limit  This 
> happens because boot.img exceed a "magic" 10mb limit.
>
> BTW, do we know the precise value for this issue?  It'd be good that
> we'd simply add a test during build, to abort it when we overrun the
> limit.
>
> Samuel
>

That's a very good question, Samuel.  Unfortunately, it's one I don't 
have a very good answer for.  I did do some digging to try to find an 
answer for you, however.

The first below-linked article [1] states that the limit is actually 8 
mb, but that 10 mb seems to work for some people.  My informal testing 
seems to bear out the 10 mb limit, since the boot.img for wheezy is just 
under 10mb, but the 11mb image in jessie doesn't work.

I think the actual *reason* for the limit is that sun4u (UltraSPARC I, 
II, III and IV)  machines do not initialize the processor's MMU. Tjhe 
second below-linked article [2] (and the error message I get when 
attempting to boot) seems to bear this out, but *that* article states 
that the limit is actually 4 mb.  Again, I know from experience that 
this is not the case.

This article also makes the dubious claim that this isn't a problem on 
sun4v (UltraSPARC T-series) machines because those machines do 
initialize the MMU, however, note this old bug report from 2011 where 
the same problem occurred: 
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=645657 and that it was 
reported against a T1000 (sun4v) as well as a V240 (sun4u).

TL;DR:  I think the limit is 10mb, and previous bug reports suggest this 
to be true, but other people say different things.

[1] 
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/JavaStation-HOWTO/questionsandtroubleshooting-questionsandtroubleshootingchapter.html#QuestionsandTroubleshooting-TenMBLimitTSSection

[2] http://www.funtoo.org/Netboot_image_creation_for_SPARC_machines

Thanks,

Rob Shinn


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