Re: Making d-i work on oldworlds

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 06:02:25AM -0200, Rogério Brito wrote:
> On Oct 15 2003, Gaudenz Steinlin wrote:
> > Did this work with a kernel 2.4? Do you know which options you need for 
> > running the kernel on an oldworld (minimal .config would be nice to have).
> 
> I put a slim .config that I have used to boot an oldworld (PMac 9500
> 180MP) at <http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito/config-2.4.23-pre5-ben0-1.ow>.
> It has few options turned on, but serves as a proof of concept for
> booting a 2.4 kernel on oldworlds.
> 
> > Do you think it would be possible to make a minimal kernel (everything 
> > not needed for booting into an initrd in modules) that works on 
> > newworlds and oldworlds and fits on a floppy (compressed) at the same 
> > time? Or should we simply forget that and build a seperate kernel for 
> > oldworlds with another configuration?
> 
> >From my experiments, the kernel from Debian proper (2.4.22-powerpc-smp),
> when gzipped, takes about 1.5MB, which is obviously quite a lot for a
> floppy. OTOH, it boots and works ok with quik on said oldworld.
> 
> If some support is removed from it, then I'd guess that one could
> squeeze a kernel that works with both oldworlds and newworlds into a
> boot floppy with miboot. It seems that miboot takes about 100-150kb of
> the boot floppy.

This is what i plan to do. Once i have finished modifying the package to
also be usable on prep, chrp and chrp-rs6k, i will see if i can manage
to diminish the kernel size to the needed size for a miboot floppy. This
would maybe need to use a module initrd or something such, in which i
have not much experience, though.

Friendly,

Sven Luther