Hello, I'm in the middle of building a new set of bootdisks (floppy & tftp images generated, still need to build the base system).
I experienced troubles with booting from floppy on Sparc2. It's a long time remaining bug of our bootdisks but I possibly discovered why it fails. I always get "Read error on block nnn" when SILO starts to load and uncompress the kernel. I then tried to replace the compressed kernel by an uncompressed one, then SILO did not display this message and fully loaded the kernel :-)) It seems the sparc2 is too slow to handle both reading and decompressing on the fly :-(( This test was made with silo to 0.8.6. Now my problem is that neither the 2.0.35 kernel nor the 2.2.12 kernel targeted for bootdisks fit uncompressed in a 1.44MB floppy disc :-(( In effect, the 2.0.35 could fit either when converted to a.out file format (170KB less) or the symbol table removed (160KB less). Is there any reason to keep the symbol table in the kernel image ? It appears that /proc/ksyms could still list them after the file was strip. About the 2.2.12, it is still to big (1.6MB). If we want to boot sparc2 and older with 2.2 kernel, we need to provide a smaller kernel. On this topic, I would want to know which devices in the following list could be removed from the kernel (i.e. unlikely to be available in an old sparc) in order to shrink down the kernel below the 1.4MB limit: framebuffers: CG14 LEO TCX scsi cards: QLOGIC/PTI net cards: HappyMeal, SunBMac, SunQE, Myrinet and other ones I missed... Thanks in advance. -- Eric Delaunay | "La guerre justifie l'existence des militaires. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | En les supprimant." Henri Jeanson (1900-1970)
