Re: And now for something completely different... etch!
On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 07:58:11PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Andreas Gredler wrote:
> > Is there a way to handle this? Could a kernel be patched to read data
> > from multiple floppy disks? I know that this question sounds a little
> > bit stupid, but floppies still seem to be the most reliable way to boot.
>
> joey@dragon:/boot>ls -l vmlinuz-2.6.11-1-386
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1170465 May 20 04:54 vmlinuz-2.6.11-1-386
>
> Since d-i currently puts the initrd that reads the second floppy (or
> other USB media) on the boot floppy with the kernel, we either have to
> shoehorn that initrd, which is currently 644k, onto the same floppy,
> reducing its size by 414k somehow.
I have to take a look at the initrd. 414k sounds much to me :-(
> uclibc is one possibility, but 409-some kilobytes of that 644k are used
> for kernel modules and other stuff that uclibc wouldn't effect (much);
> only 235k is used for libc currently, and I fear those numbers don't add
> up to uclibc making it small enough, unless uclibc occupys only 5k of
> the compressed disk. Maybe other changes, like using initramfs for that
> image, a little kernel hacking to remove a few modules that are barely
> used (like ide-core which is on there for only 1 symbol on 2.4; didn't
> check 2.6), and so on might just make it work.
Removing kernel modules might work for 2.6 but I'm afraid that the
kernel will still grow and we will sometimes end up with a kernel, which
will never fit on a floppy disk again. But maybe I'm too pessimistic ;-)
(But maybe there won't be any motherboards left, that aren't able to boot
from USB)
> Or we could make make some compromise, such as using the kernel initrd
> loader to load the initrd from a second floppy, which might cause
> problems for USB floppy installs (does the kernel initrd loader support
> usb floppies?) and would break the floppy+usb stick install path. It
> would also add yet another floppy to the install, probably.
I think one more floppy would be ok, if initrd loader is able to load
the initrd from usb floppies or anything else.
IMO the first boot media is always the most problematic one. Maybe I
can't boot from USB, but I can boot from floppy and then read data (like
initrd) from a usb-device.
greets Jimmy
--
Andreas "Jimmy" Gredler
,'"`. http://www.g-tec.co.at/ | jimmy@g-tec.co.at
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