Re: Bootint big kernels
On Thu, Jun 11, 1998 at 09:41:03AM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> The problem is that the Debian installation kernel tries to be all things
> to all people. As there are machines that boot from SCSI drives, it was
> necessary to have all the scsi controlers "built in" to the kernel, hense
> its large size.
>
> We should recommend that everyone, once they have a standard system and
> can build a kernel, should build a custom kernel for their machine as
> early as possible.
This is, if I recall, exactly what initrd was made for. Your bootloader
(eg. lilo) loads an initial ramdisk containing all the kernel modules you
might need. An init script on the ramdisk loads the right modules (however
you choose to do that) and then exits; the kernel unmounts the ramdisk and
remounts the "real" rootdisk.
That way, you can have a kernel without _any_ disk drivers at all (even IDE)
and yet boot from any disk that has a kernel driver. Works like a charm and
avoids all problems with conflicting drivers.
Unfortunately, I would expect it to have the same high-loading problems as
bzImage since a kernel+initrd would seldom fit in the low 640k.
Have fun,
Avery
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