Hi,
Herbert Xu has uploaded a fixed ash to incoming, so the crash problem
when installing modules will go away soon.
The alpha bootdisk generation is generally a bit crufty and broken, I
intended to clean up things a bit, but I have not much knowledge about
the different Alpha systems, I've only ever tried SRM and AlphaBios.
Here are my plans for the Alpha bootdisks:
* kernel floppy (rescue is a bit misleading here). Ext2. Contains
a generic 2.2.19 kernel. Bootable directly by SRM consoles via
aboot. Bootable from other consoles via milo disks. Contains extra
UP 1000 aka Nautilus stuff (how do UP 1000's actually boot?). Tested
for SRM already. Mostly completed.
* 19 milo_$SUBARCH disks. Each contains a subarch-specific milo, and
a loadlin.exe/ldmilo.exe, and has been prepared to be booted from
SRM with srmbootfat (though using the aboot on the kernel floppy
is preferable). The milo binaries will be downloaded from
http://www.suse.de/~stepan/binaries/2.2-18/ with wget (I'd add a
builddep). loadlin.exe/ldmilo.exe will be downloaded from
ftp.debian.org, I don't know if there is any more 'generic'
place. Problem here: srmbootfat is not available anywhere as
binary. This is the only step that can't be made automatically
easily: it needs to be extracted from
http://www.suse.de/~stepan/source/milo-2.2-18.tar.bz2 and built
manually. David Huggins-Daines has already written a script to build
milo disks, I'll only have to activate that.
Question: did I get it right that Ruffian needs ldmilo.exe and all
other loadlin.exe? I couldn't find documentation on that...
Note in the past we provided only milo binaries, but I find milo
disks more convenient, and they can also be booted from SRM which is
pointless for the install, but might be handy for rescue since MILO
knows devices SRM can't access.
* root disk. Contains gzipped ext2 fs directly written to
floppy. Barely fits now. Completed except for bug fixes.
* special Jensen and Nautilus stuff. I can't test this, I can only try
not to break it.
* remove support for disks with special kernel images for the
subarch's (except jensen and nautilus, which seem to be unable to
run generic kernels). Would be nice if a kernel would fit together
with a milo on a disk, but it doesn't. We also don't have those
kernel images in the archive anymore.
* net boot stuff. I'll disable it until I get around to understanding
it.
Well, I hope I can get a bit of feedback about this plan, especially
on the milo stuff and the intent to remove subarch kernel support...
Falk
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