Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 12:45:22 +0100 From: nik@iii.co.uk To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: nik@iii.co.uk, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Different kernels for the bindist and boot.flp? Message-ID: <19970918124522.57711@strand.iii.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <199709181124.UAA00465@word.smith.net.au>; from Mike Smith on Thu, Sep 18, 1997 at 08:53:59PM %2B0930 References: <19970918121246.52480@strand.iii.co.uk> <199709181124.UAA00465@word.smith.net.au>
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On Thu, Sep 18, 1997 at 08:53:59PM +0930, Mike Smith wrote:
[Do -current boot.flp's support IDE ZIP out of the box?]
> Yes, and specifically yes, you must have a disk in and leave it in.
> Removing it will make Bad Things happen.
Thanks for confirming that.
> > But there is also the more general problem of integrating a custom built
> > kernel into the rest of the installation mechanism right from the start.
> > Including dropping the correct kernel into /kernel. Of course, this might
> > turn into a bit of a no-brainer as well.
>
> No, it's actually quite hard. Due to the way the boot floppy works,
> you have to build a custom image with your new kernel, and then hack
> sysinstall to splat a new kernel image down after it's extracted the
> bindist. You could alternatively specify a different kernel to go in
> the bindist, which is relatively straightforward but slow (you have to
> build a release to do it).
This is why I was thinking about seperating the bin dist into a bin dist and
a kernel dist. The new bin dist contains everything non-kernel specific,
the kernel dists each contain one kernel with support for a specific set of
features, and the kernel config file used to create them.
Imagine a few kernel distribution sets
Kernel Kernel Distribution Floppy image
GENERIC generic.[aa-..] generic.flp
IDEZIP idezip.[aa-..] idezip.flp
NOSCSI noscsi.[aa-..] noscsi.flp
The user writes the boot floppy as normal, using one of the .flp images.
When they boot, and are selecting which bits to install, an extra entry
appears on the menu for "Kernel distributions". Selecting this takes the
user to another screen, where they select which kernel distribution they
want to download and use. These are exclusive selections (radio button
rather than checkbox). The default entry is hardwired into sysinstall,
depending on the floppy image. So,
sysinstall on generic.flp defaults to GENERIC
sysinstall on idezip.flp defaults to IDEZIP
sysinstall on noscsi.flp defaults to NOSCSI
But the user could change change from this default if they needed to (I'm
trying to think of a scenario where they might need to, and failing, but
I see no point in restricting the user's freedom).
Doing all this once, by hand, is probably not too difficult (I think it
just needs lots of disk space to hold multiple copies of /usr/src for each
different 'make release'.
Doing this so that the release engineer can do the equivalent of
make -DDESTDIR=/releases/GENERIC -DKERNEL=generic
make -DDESTDIR=/releases/IDEZIP -DKERNEL=idezip
make -DDESTDIR=/releases/NOSCSI -DKERNEL=noscsi
(or similar) is another matter entirely.
At this point, I turn around and ask the release engineer whether this
sort of functionality is actually useful?
[ This space intentonally left blank for Jordan's reply :-) ]
> Oh, I meant hacking the release code 8)
Oh yes, that too. Did I delete the comment about needing eight pairs of
hands to keep track of what's going where. . ?
N
--
--+==[ Nik Clayton is Just Another Perl Hacker at Interactive Investor ]==+--
'|' "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." (with apologies to Magritte) NC5-RIPE
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