Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 10:34:05 +1030 From: "Thyer, Matthew" <Matthew.Thyer@dsto.defence.gov.au> To: "Wilkinson, Alex" <Alex.Wilkinson@dsto.defence.gov.au> Cc: "'gallatin@cs.duke.edu'" <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>, "'fclift@verio.net'" <fclift@verio.net>, "'alpha@freebsd.org'" <alpha@freebsd.org>, "'obrien@FreeBSD.org'" <obrien@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: HEADS UP, floppy installs desupported for 5.0 (fwd) Message-ID: <108E7D907871D6118B5000306E0189F85759A2@ednex504.dsto.defence.gov.au>
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I'd hope we can split the Alpha boot floppies even further to get around these kind of problems.
What is required at minimum is the following:
- kern.flp: loader and kernel only (use leftover room for mandatory modules to be loaded + common modules.... i.e. whatever network modules we can fit).
this kernel should have barely anything.... just enough to load modules from whichever copy of driver.flp that you need for your hardware.
- mfsroot.flp: the rest of sysinstall etc.
- fixit.flp: as usual but I'd like to get this to 1.44 MB as Alpha people need to recover too.
- driver.flp:
A set of driver floppies would be available which could be read by the loader and allow the user to interactively choose which modules to load.
This would be similar to installing old Solaris x86 where you need to use "Driver Update" disks.
The boot process off install floppies would then go something like:
1) kern.flp
2) driver.flp
3) next driver.flp etc until you have loaded all the modules you need
4) mfsroot.flp
I'm not advocating this just to fix the Alpha problem... it would be a good move for any platform and would allow third parties to provide modules that could be used at install time.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2002 17:15:05 -0500 (EST)
From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>
To: Fred Clift <fclift@verio.net>
Cc: alpha@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: HEADS UP, floppy installs desupported for 5.0
Fred Clift writes:
> On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, David O'Brien wrote:
> >
> >
> > It has become very hard to produce boot floppies for 5.0 on the Alpha
> > platform. The kernel has just grown too large. The amount of effort
> > required to get 'make release' to properly build the floppy images just
> > requires too much effort.
>
> Anyone care to provide more information on what exactly is required on the
> floppy that makes it so big? is it the _very_ wide range of
> hardware/drivers needed to fit a good cross-section of the target
> machines? I'm just curious.
One cannot make an alpha kernel fit on a floppy alongside the loader
unless one removes nearly all drivers (including disk drivers), NFS,
IPV6, etc,etc.
>
> > We do desire to offer a small boot image (say 8 MB) that one can 'dd'
> > onto the beginning of a hard disk and boot from that to do an install.
>
> So the two options off hand will be boot from CD or boot from temp hard
> disk?
>
> Are there other, (though perhaps painful) options? I'm somewhat concerned
> that I'm going to have to open up my box and put a hard disk in it just to
> do an install...
Netbooting.
Drew
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