From owner-freebsd-alpha Tue Nov 5 8:22:59 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A250337B401 for ; Tue, 5 Nov 2002 08:22:58 -0800 (PST) Received: from duke.cs.duke.edu (duke.cs.duke.edu [152.3.140.1]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 51E6843E3B for ; Tue, 5 Nov 2002 08:22:54 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) Received: from grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (grasshopper.cs.duke.edu [152.3.145.30]) by duke.cs.duke.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA14055; Tue, 5 Nov 2002 11:22:48 -0500 (EST) Received: (from gallatin@localhost) by grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (8.11.6/8.9.1) id gA5GMIu35889; Tue, 5 Nov 2002 11:22:18 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) From: Andrew Gallatin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15815.61498.679542.992377@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 11:22:18 -0500 (EST) To: Fred Clift Cc: "alpha@freebsd.org" Subject: RE: HEADS UP, floppy installs desupported for 5.0 (fwd) In-Reply-To: <20021105091514.L69586-100000@vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net> References: <20021105091514.L69586-100000@vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 12) "Channel Islands" XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Fred Clift writes: > On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, John Baldwin wrote: > > > > > On 05-Nov-2002 Thyer, Matthew wrote: > > > 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: > > > > This is what we do already. Even i386 now uses 3 floppies to install. The problem is > > that a really, really stripped down 5.0 kernel still doesn't fit onto kern.flp with the > > loader. > > Being new to the alpha architecture, my biggest problem with all this is > that I dont know enough to even have vague ideas of _why_ the i386 bare > kernel is so much smaller than the alpha bare kernel. > > Can anyone explain this? I'm really just curious :). 64 bit longs and pointers vs 32 bit longs and pointers is a big part of it. Another issue is that alpha is risc, and x86 is cisc. Alpha generally requires more instructions to do the same job. Drew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message