Debian live with a newer kernel?
Hi there. I'm using the debian live CD (debian-live-etch-i386-
standard.iso, from late February 2007) for a project. I need to boot
a system and perform block-level analysis and transport of the disk
devices, so I needed a LiveCD type distribution to run on. I've
adding a few additional tools to the ISO and squashfs, and rebuilding
the image.
A problem I've noted is that I'm frequently booting on multi-
processor machines with numerous gigabytes of memory. The i386
kernel that's on the above-noted CD claims to cap memory use at below
a megabyte, and only allow one processor to be used. From boot
messages:
Warning only 896MB will be used.
Use a HIGHMEM enabled kernel.
896MB LOWMEM available.
Processor #0 ....
Processor #1 ....
WARNING: NR_CPUS limit of 1 reached. Processor ignored.
As some of the analyses we're doing of the disk devices contain
some fairly-heavy math, there would be an advantage to a second (or
even more, if we find more than one controller such that we're trying
to read from more than one disk simultaniously) processor. And,
clearly, more memory is never bad when doing so much I/O.
I took a look at just apt-get install'ing linux-image-2.6-686, to
update the kernel on the squashfs (and then copying the pieces out
into the ISO), but after doing that the system no longer boots into
multiuser, it just stops in busy-box halfway up. So, there's clearly
a stage I don't understand about how the LiveCD is put together.
What I'm hoping to find on the list is either:
1) a pointer to a 686-kernel LiveCD, so this problem will mostly
already be solved, or
2) advice on how to update the kernel on the debian-live-etch-i386-
standard.iso image's squashfs (and ISO) maintaining the full LiveCD
functionality.
Thanks. I hope to hear back from someone soon...
- Chris
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