booting old sparc with floppy

[Eric Delaunay <delaunay@lix.polytechnique.fr>]

Hello,

  I'm in the middle of building a new set of bootdisks (floppy & tftp images
generated, still need to build the base system).

I experienced troubles with booting from floppy on Sparc2.  It's a long time
remaining bug of our bootdisks but I possibly discovered why it fails.

I always get "Read error on block nnn" when SILO starts to load and uncompress
the kernel.
I then tried to replace the compressed kernel by an uncompressed one, then SILO
did not display this message and fully loaded the kernel :-))
It seems the sparc2 is too slow to handle both reading and decompressing on the
fly :-((

This test was made with silo to 0.8.6.

Now my problem is that neither the 2.0.35 kernel nor the 2.2.12 kernel targeted
for bootdisks fit uncompressed in a 1.44MB floppy disc :-((
In effect, the 2.0.35 could fit either when converted to a.out file format
(170KB less) or the symbol table removed (160KB less).
Is there any reason to keep the symbol table in the kernel image ?  It appears
that /proc/ksyms could still list them after the file was strip.

About the 2.2.12, it is still to big (1.6MB).
If we want to boot sparc2 and older with 2.2 kernel, we need to provide a
smaller kernel.  On this topic, I would want to know which devices in the
following list could be removed from the kernel (i.e. unlikely to be available
in an old sparc) in order to shrink down the kernel below the 1.4MB limit:

framebuffers: CG14 LEO TCX
scsi cards: QLOGIC/PTI
net cards: HappyMeal, SunBMac, SunQE, Myrinet
and other ones I missed...

Thanks in advance.

-- 
 Eric Delaunay                 | "La guerre justifie l'existence des militaires.
 delaunay@lix.polytechnique.fr | En les supprimant." Henri Jeanson (1900-1970)