I've taken a first look at what is involved in supporting installation of 2.6.14 kernels in Debian Installer _for the installed system_. Note: This is a separate issue from running the installer with a 2.6.14 kernel. During kernel installation sysfs needs to be mounted on /target (at least for yaird). This is currently breaking installations for unstable (and will break network based base installations for beta1 and daily builds when 2.6.14 migrates to testing). /target/proc is currently mounted by apt-install, so this probably needs to be added there (only for 2.6 kernels). The following packages are currently pulled in as dependencies by the 2.6.14 kernel: - yaird - perl (3.3 MB) - perl-modules (2.2 MB) - libhtml-template-perl - libparse-recdescent-perl These requirements look quite heavy to me and may be a problem for the netinst. If we would install initramfs-tools, we would need: - busybox - klibc-utils - mklibs-copy - udev This looks a lot lighter, but the dependency on udev probably means some manipulation of /target/dev will be required. Using udev in d-i itself may make that easier. Both initrd generators have limitations in what they currently support. We may have to either always install both, or include logic that pre-installs one or the other depending on the situation. Currently we modify the configuration of initrd-tools: - temporary hardcoding of root partition - default resume partition Would we need to do the same for the new initrd generators? The dependency on sysfs and udev will make it practically impossible to install a 2.6 kernel when running the installer with 2.4. We should probably check for this in base-installer and make sure the option is not presented to the user. Please comment. Any people interested in working on this?
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