booting old sparc with floppy
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)
Re: swap on NFS
On Sun, Sep 19, 1999 at 09:15:25PM +0200, Eric Delaunay wrote: I'm willing to provide swap on NFS for our bootdisk kernel (at least in sparc32 arch) to allow installation on low memory diskless workstations (8MB or less). I did some trial with my current bootdisks and it appears that 16MB (maybe 12MB but I don't have the needed SIMM modules to create such configuration) is the minimum required to install Debian on a diskless workstation. On i386 you may do MEM=xxx in the lilo.conf memsize which seems to do something on Sparc but not as properly as it should. Results in a crash aka hang after Uncompressing Linux - So this seems to be a bug in the Sparc kernel. When getting this to work you might be able to test any low-mem construction you might want to .. Flo -- Florian Lohoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] +49-5241-470566 ... The failure can be random; however, when it does occur, it is catastrophic and is repeatable ... Cisco Field Notice
Re: Can't add local route
On Sun, Sep 19, 1999 at 11:39:42PM +0200, Andreas Jaehnigen wrote: Hi everybody I'm trying to install Debian on a Sparc clone... It runs kernel 2.2.12 (compiled it myself). A Sun Lance ethernet card is successfully detected upon kernel startup. However, initialisation scripts give me errors, especially the network ones. in /etc/rcS.d/ The script S40 tries to add some routes.. and whoops! SIOCADDRT: Invalid argument What's going wrong here? I suppose I forgot to add some sort of support in the kernel-- but which kind of?? Hints are greatly appreciated!! And thanks!! :-)) Might be from the upgrade from 2.0 to 2.2 kernels. 2.2 Kernels automatically set routes for interfaces configured by ifconfig so when adding the same route again you get an error ... Just kill route commands from your setup except the default route Flo -- Florian Lohoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] +49-5241-470566 ... The failure can be random; however, when it does occur, it is catastrophic and is repeatable ... Cisco Field Notice
