On Sun, Jul 06, 2003 at 07:58:57PM +0300, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: > On Sun, Jul 06, 2003 at 06:44:06PM +0300, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: > > On Sun, Jul 06, 2003 at 04:51:45PM +0200, Erez Doron wrote: > > [snip] > > > > > > I know how to write a kernel driver that accesses physical mem, but > > > until i run 'lspci' i d not know what memory address was given to my card. > > > also, if i use a driver, i need to find the sources for the specific > > > kernel i have on cd, make a driver and use a floppy (as i d not have a > > > hard drive). > > > > Why not? It's quite easy to boot knoppix with a custom kernel. This is > > the recommended (by us) way to debug kernel code for OS course students. > > The only thing you need except vanilla linux kernel sources is the cloop > > driver (for their compressed loop). > > Careful here! > > The cloop module may be problematic. Consider the following bug report: > > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165203
Well, Never Happened To Me (TM). At least once I read the entire knoppix cloop, changed it, and created it back, without any problem. While this report doesn't make it clear to me that the problem is with cloop per se, I think it's not too much work to move to somthing else (such as cramfs, isofs with compression, etc.) - I do not follow knoppix closely, but I guess by now they either started supporting other compression methods or fixed cloop (or whatever the problem was). > > A number of attempts to use to extract files from a knoppix CD have > resulted in some hung (D) processes. It gave me an opportunity to find > out a bit about force-umounting (There is a switch that is intended > for NFS, and doesn't work cleanly for other FSs) :-( > Also not for NFS :-( > > You can put on the hard disk lilo > > with several kernels and initrd images (one of them can be the original > > knoppix one) > > Also note that the debian initrds are cramfs and the default knoppix > kernel has cramfs as a module. Thus if you need an initrd to boot it (e.g: > have reiserfs for root filesystem) you'll have to create an initrd in a > different way. > I am sorry to say that - I am a happy Debian user for around 6 years, but all this time I always compiled my own kernels and configed lilo etc. myself. I have no idea what Debian does in this regard - I do know they have quite an infrastructure for managing kernels, but I never took the time to learn it. That said, I of course do not suggest to anyone to mix-and-match initrd's between distros - this is dangerous. In our case, my script took knoppix's initrd, gunzipped and mounted it, compiled cloop against the user's kernel, copied the compiled cloop over the one in the initrd and undid the above back into lilo. > > , you'll need to put in the initrd a cloop compiled against > > your kernel, and mostly it works. > > what do you mean by "mostly"? What happens when it doesn't? > "mostly" means there are few small details one has to take care of - such as the kernel command line, etc. My add-my-kernel script is 44 lines - I did not feel this was the right thread/place to detail it. I only tested it few times, on 5 machines, never had a problem myself, never got a report from students (and I know they used it). Anyway, Erez already mentioned he used knoppix happily. I do not think knoppix has something mysterious - in fact, about 2-3 years ago I made such a bootable CD myself. I only think knoppix does what it does very very well, and is currently the best live-CD distro (but this is in no way an attempt to start a flame-war - I did read about others, but only tried myself 3 others before getting to this conclusion). If you want to use (or advocate) something else - go ahead. -- Didi ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
