Date: Mon, 6 Nov 1995 16:34:47 +0100 (MET) From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) To: julian@ref.tfs.com (Julian Elischer) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hackers) Subject: Re: More nits Message-ID: <199511061534.QAA13888@allegro.lemis.de> In-Reply-To: <199511052204.OAA05332@ref.tfs.com> from "Julian Elischer" at Nov 5, 95 02:04:23 pm
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Julian Elischer writes:
>
> > At 11:48 PM 11/4/95, David Greenman wrote:
> > Along those same lines, I would hope that the CD could contain enough of a
> > framework to make it fairly easy to generate a custom kernel install
> > floppy. It would be a big win if we could offer the ability to build custom
> > floppies for unusual configurations (like those 4meg'ers that can't make it
> > under the wire) or the atapi driver that doesn't quite make it into the
> > release, but for which we might find a solution for certain machines.
>
> I really think the cdrom should contain a 4MB boot disk
> there are several assumptions we can make that make this possible..
>
> 1/ 4MB machines will almost definitly be IDE/ESDI
> ergo we don't need SCSI.. that's a LOT of space right there..
> 2/ they are installing from cdrom or DOS.. or other non network system.
> ergo we don't need network stuff
I don't think that this is a valid assumption. My machine may be so
primitive that it doesn't even have a CD-ROM. Of course, if it's on a
network, there may be other solutions open to it.
> taking those out MUST make a kernel that can boot in 4MB..
> don't tell me that it doesn't fit or it's too much work..
> if we can't fit another floppy on the cdrom there's a problem..
I've learned a number of things about kernel size over the last few
days:
1. We have stuff like config in there which must take up quite a bit
of space.
2. We have 1 MB MFS in there. Is that really all needed? BSDI
manages an uncompressed boot disk without any required MFS.
3. At least on the machines I was using (some Siemens-Nixdorf "brand
name" junk), FreeBSD indicated that it hadn't reclaimed the BIOS's
384 kB. BSD/OS did, so this isn't a matter of "the machine won't
let me".
I think that we need to look at these areas *if* we want to run in
4MB. And I think we do--it's a bit of a status thing ("Linux runs in
4 MB - good. Windows 95% doesn't - bad. FreeBSD doesn't either -
bad.").
> We gotta give these guys a way of installing....
One thing we need to make very sure is that these kernels aren't
somewhere where they could be mistaken for the standard distribution.
Those of you who've installed Linux will know what a pain it is to try
to figure out which 2 disk images to use. If we supply supplementary
kernels we need to hide them in a subdirectory clearly marked
"emergency only".
Greg
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