On Thursday 31 May 2007 20:47, peter green wrote: > Since we already know the bios can read the users floppy drive (or they > wouldn't have been booting off it) it would seem to make sense to load > all the floppies BEFORE loading linux and abandoning the bios's > services.
Here are the contents of an Etch i386 boot floppy: -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1137494 2007-03-10 08:57 linux -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 117159 2007-03-10 08:57 initrd.gz -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 59 2007-03-10 08:57 disk.lbl -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 9932 2007-03-10 08:57 ldlinux.sys -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 591 2007-03-10 08:57 syslinux.cfg -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 67 2007-03-10 08:57 boot.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 859 2007-03-10 08:57 f1.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 666 2007-03-10 08:57 f2.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 616 2007-03-10 08:57 f3.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 416 2007-03-10 08:57 f4.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 806 2007-03-10 08:57 f5.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1139 2007-03-10 08:57 f6.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 916 2007-03-10 08:57 f7.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1102 2007-03-10 08:57 f8.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 766 2007-03-10 08:57 f9.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 568 2007-03-10 08:57 f10.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9519 2007-03-10 08:57 splash.rle As you can see, almost all space on the boot floppy is already used by the kernel, with the initrd at about 10% of that and the rest negligible. So, the only real issue is the size of the kernel and freeing up space by being able to do without an initrd on the boot floppy (although nice), would probably only buy us some time. So, my main question would be: what is possible? Can we avoid the need for the minimal "boot floppy initrd"? Could the kernel be split over 2 floppies? Will users still be able to choose installation methods and enter boot parameters? I'm very much in favor of following up on this. If it could mean supporting booting from USB floppies again, that would be great. Cheers, FJP
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