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Date:      Tue, 5 Nov 2002 11:22:18 -0500 (EST)
From:      Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>
To:        Fred Clift <fclift@verio.net>
Cc:        "alpha@freebsd.org" <alpha@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: HEADS UP, floppy installs desupported for 5.0 (fwd)
Message-ID:  <15815.61498.679542.992377@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20021105091514.L69586-100000@vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net>
References:  <XFMail.20021105093952.jhb@FreeBSD.org> <20021105091514.L69586-100000@vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net>

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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

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