On 08/04/2010 09:22 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
On 08/04/2010 04:00 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
Maybe we're just being too fancy here.
We could rewrite -kernel/-append/-initrd to just generate a floppy
image in RAM, and just boot from floppy.
May be. Can floppy be 100M?
Well, in theory you can have 16384 bytes/sector, 256 tracks, 255
sectors, 2 heads... that makes 2^(14+8+8+1) = 2 GB. :) Not sure the
BIOS would read such a beast, or SYSLINUX.
By the way, if libguestfs insists for an initrd rather than a CDROM
image, it could do something in between and make an ISO image with
ISOLINUX and the required kernel/initrd pair.
(By the way, a network installation image for a typical distribution
has a 120M initrd, so it's not just libguestfs. It is very useful to
pass the network installation images directly to qemu via
-kernel/-initrd).
We could make kernel an awful lot smarter but unless we've got someone
just itching to write 16-bit option rom code, I think our best bet is to
try to leverage a standard bootloader and expose a disk containing the
kernel/initrd.
Otherwise, we just stick with what we have and deal with the performance
as is.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
Paolo
