Re: building compressed kernel
On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Thomas Seyrat wrote:
> > Does anyone on the list know how to make compressed sparc kernels?
>
> I can't see the point in doing such a thing.
>
> Sparc does not have the size limitation during boot associated to
> C hardware, so, compressing the kernel is not really necessary as
> to that matter. If you really have to compress it (hard disk
> usage being a problem ?), well, gzip your vmlinux and try to boot that :-)
Well, it's a diskless machine booting via tftp. But it doesn't like a
tftpimage (probably not enough memory), and for one reason or another the
downloading of the kernel is painfully slow (takes a few minutes
to download the current 1.5 Mb standard kernel).
About just gzipping: from what I gather from Makefiles of other platforms,
you need to prepend some unzip-code to the kernel (piggyback). I can't
find this one in the kernel tree either. Or does a gzip self-extracting
archive suffice on the sparc platform (if such a thing even exists for
gzip)?
> > It however appears that some machines (slower Sparcs) don't really
> like booting compressed kernels.
Do they crash or just take long to uncompress? Mine would be in the
mentioned category, being a Sparc IPC with 12 Mb ram.
Tim.
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