Warning: this post does not contain the working code requested :)
...but working on the 2.5.6 ide subsystem,
I notice that just ide.o is ~48k... almost as big as linuxBIOS itsself.
drivers/ide/*.o is like 512k. I'll try using the "old" hd.c driver...
perhaps it's smaller
In trying to strip down the Linux kernel, has it been tried to configure it
without even some of the stuff we take for granted? Like unix domain
sockets, or maybe even networking? (for disk boot only)
I mean, actually do some development, making some extra config options
to turn stuff off... remove elevator code...
I'm guessing nobody has gone far enough to say for sure it's impossible,
right?
I would start by configuring a minimal kernel, compiling, and breaking down
by elf section name and directory... let me see...
make mrproper ; make dep; make bzImage
for i in {.text, .data, .bss, __ex_table, .rodata, .data.init, .setup.init }
; do
find linux -name *.o -exec objdump -h {} | grep $i | cut ....
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ronald G Minnich" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "ollie" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Eric Seppanen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 8:16 PM
Subject: Re: OOPS! Ron is Wrong! Re: should linuxbios turn on PCI devices in
general?
> On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, ollie wrote:
>
> > Are you using SiS900 driver in etherboot ?? In 5.0.5 and later, the
> > driver turns on BMDMA it self.
> >
>
> yes, etherboot does turn on some BMDMA for some interfaces. Here is a fun
> problem we had. Etherboot was not turning on BMDMA on the eepro100 we had
> on the smartcore-p5. And yet etherboot had an eepro100 driver. It turned
> out that the device id on the smartpro eepro100 is slightly different than
> the one in etherboot, so we had to update the etherboot driver.
>
> Looking at the eepro100 driver in etherboot reveals an aging 2.2-era
> driver. If there are bug updates in later Linux kernels for eepro100, they
> probably won't make it easily into the old eepro100 driver in Etherboot.
>
> This type of problem is the reason I am not so convinced we want elfBIOS.
> I don't see how elfBIOS or etherboot or whatever will ever keep up with
> what the kernel does.
>
> One last example. With our bproc primary boot in FLASH, we can boot over
> myrinet. Anybody volunteer to take on the task of putting myrinet into
> etherboot? Not me, for sure. I'm not up for that challenge.
>
> But, I'm willing to be convinced with working code :-)
>
> ron
>
