On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 10:39 +0200, Frans Pop wrote: > On Wednesday 30 April 2008, Ian Campbell wrote: > > On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 12:30 +0100, Ian Campbell wrote: > > > Shall I define a new environment variable ${DI_FLAVOUR} passed to the > > > base-installer/kernel scripts containing the kernel suffix (i.e. -486 > > > vs -686-bigmem) or ... > > > > Something like this? (only tested with the tests in the tree so far not > > a proper image) > > IIUC this would only work if the installer is already running a -bigmem > kernel, which might be an option for custom versions of the installer, but > IMO not for regular versions.
That was going to be the subject of my next post ;-) A PAE-capable install image is required to support d-i on Xen (since the majority of Xen installations are PAE). I don't know about other hypervisor technologies particularly but I'd not be surprised if they preferred PAE too since virtualisation tends to imply a >4G host machine even if the individual VMs are smaller. I'd really like it if Debian could supply a PAE enable installer as standard but if not I'll find another way (presumably supplying one myself). I experimented with a netboot image with both -486 and -686-bigmem and it added 1.4M to a 5M initrd.gz image, which I can see could be unacceptable. A separate netboot-bigmem could be an alternative (note: I think for PV install netboot is the most obvious choice for the installer, cdrom a distant second and floppy etc nowhere insight) > It's also awfully i386 specific. The PAE vs non-PAE problem is pretty i386 specific anyway. Do you have an idea for a more generic solution? I'm happy to go down a different route. > Also, I would personally prefer not to have the full 'uname -r' passed to > the kernel selection scripts. yes, this was more of a quick POC hack to solicit opinions on the general idea -- I'll make it only pass the flavour bit of the version. > Finally, you seem to be setting a PAE envvar, which is subsequently not used > anywhere. Yes, it's a remnant of the early versions of the code. I was half thinking of adding a check for >4G RAM && PAE for native use too. Ian. -- Ian Campbell Current Noise: Sabbat - The Best Of Enemies The odds are a million to one against your being one in a million. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]