On 9/7/06, Casper.Dik at sun.com <Casper.Dik at sun.com> wrote: > Originally, both ran the miniroot from disk but this required the realmode > drivers for bootstrapping (loading bits from all over the place until the > disk/net device driver was loaded).
Last time I looked closely at a Red Hat installer, the text mode installer was available in a few MB and resided in RAM. This was in the days when a Compaq DL360 with 128 MB was a pretty decent box. If you wanted GUI, you could use the bits in the few MB of text mode to provide higher level functionality by mounting the tools from NFS, CD, local hard drive, etc. A key tool used to make this possible is busybox - essentially one executable that knows how to be a shell and 50 or so other commands via multiple hard links in /bin. The last time I looked at the compressed UFS image shipped as part of newboot (with S10U1), it seemed as though very little fat had been trimmed. Certainly there was no effort analagous to the approach taken by busybox. I also noticed functionality that had been removed without removing the corresponding binaries and reclaiming of space. By using the BIOS to read a mini root that has drivers required to access common network devices, block devices, file systems, keyboards, and text-mode displays, the bits could be in place to read things like the X server and complicated install logic from installation media without pulling it all into a ramdisk. Maybe this approach is already being taken, but it is not being communicated. Mike -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
