From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 2 07:38:37 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id HAA27085 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 07:38:37 -0700 Received: from genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au [129.127.96.120]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id HAA27067 for ; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 07:38:31 -0700 Received: from msmith@localhost by genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (8.6.9/8.6.9) id AAA11626; Tue, 3 Oct 1995 00:32:18 +0930 From: Michael Smith Message-Id: <199510021502.AAA11626@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.1 will require a minimum of 8MB for installation. To: davidg@Root.COM Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1995 00:32:17 +0930 (CST) Cc: bde@zeta.org.au, hackers@freefall.freebsd.org, jkh@time.cdrom.com, julian@ref.tfs.com In-Reply-To: <199510021114.EAA04556@corbin.Root.COM> from "David Greenman" at Oct 2, 95 04:14:08 am Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1346 Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk David Greenman stands accused of saying: > > >>in the .bss in any case...this isn't a problem - we're only interested in the > >>actual size of the binary. > > > >Surely there is more of a problem fitting everything at runtime than just > >loading it? > > Nope, as far as I know the only problem is sufficient space to decompress > the kernel binary and MFS filesystem. After this has occurred, there is > "plenty" of room. If this is indeed the case, then someone should be looking at the NextByte function in /usr/src/sys/i386/boot/kzipboot/unzip.c, and making a primitive 2-stage bootloader that reads from disk in this function, rather than depending on the entire compressed kernel to be in memory. As far as I can see, at this point in the proceedings, the BIOS is still usably close, and bits for reading files can be stolen from the biosboot code. Yes, I'd love to do it, but my test machine is now my SO's, so I have nothing to test on. 8( > -DG -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] My car has "demand start" -Terry Lambert UNIX: live FreeBSD or die! [[