From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 2 08:43:04 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id IAA02428 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 08:43:04 -0700 Received: from labinfo.iet.unipi.it (labinfo.iet.unipi.it [131.114.9.5]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id IAA02247 for ; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 08:40:28 -0700 Received: from localhost (luigi@localhost) by labinfo.iet.unipi.it (8.6.5/8.6.5) id QAA23794; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 16:44:33 +0100 From: Luigi Rizzo Message-Id: <199510021544.QAA23794@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.1 will require a minimum of 8MB for installation. To: witr@rwwa.com (Robert Withrow) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 1995 16:44:32 +0100 (MET) Cc: hackers@freefall.freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199510021449.KAA14101@spooky.rwwa.com> from "Robert Withrow" at Oct 2, 95 10:49:11 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 995 Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > I have a suggestion that you (i.e. hackers) probably won't like, > but why not uncompress the kernel *from* the boot media. The > way this would work would be kinda like how VMS boots. There > would be a tertiary bootstrap whose job it would be to read > and uncompress the kernel into the proper place in memory and > start it running. > Nice idea. The only objection, the savings are a fraction of the size of a compressed kernel (you need room for the decompression code, plus a buffer for data being decompressed). If you kernel is in the 4..8MB range then it really makes sense... :) Luigi ==================================================================== Luigi Rizzo Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione email: luigi@iet.unipi.it Universita' di Pisa tel: +39-50-568533 via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) fax: +39-50-568522 http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ ====================================================================