[Etherboot-users] Questions about building "netboot floppy" in ~600KB

[Michael S. <sch...@gm...>]

Hi all,

I got tired of needing lots of boot floppies to do different stuff
(memtest, cmospwd, grub, smart boot manager, freedos, etc.) which are
almost empty, so I decided to build a floppy that can do all of the above.

On this floppy there are still about 600KB free, so I thought to put a
few etherboot .zlilos onto it as well. They are intended for booting
knoppix-terminalserver (or grml-terminalserver) when the used BIOS is
too old for netboot support. But it should remain as generic as
possible, i. e. boot everything else a netboot BIOS can usually boot.
However, I don't have an idea on which PCs I'll have to use it, so I
cannot select the correct driver before building it.

So I have a few questions:

- etherboot has quite a lot of compilation options about supported
images and the like. Which of them are usually supported by a common
netboot BIOS (on modern mainboards), which are never supported? I intend
to remove the latter ones.

- when making all zlilos (with default options, one for each driver)
they consume more than one megabyte disk space -- too much for my size
constraints. But I guess they contain lots of duplicate code. Is there
an option somewhere I missed that allows to make the zlilos two-part
(like using a generic zlilo as "kernel" and a small driver-specific file
as "initrd" -- or the same with GNU multiboot modules)?

- making an image of all drivers fails. So I guess the best option would
be a bunch of zlilos sorted by card manufacturer or something like this.
The RELNOTES suggest to use the "multiple driver rule". Where do I find
documentation about that? Simply using

make bin/foo--bar--baz.zlilo

(as I read the comment in parentheses) did not work for me.

- are there any known incompatibilities (like driver foo crashes when it
finds card bar) to avoid when making images for multiple drivers? Are
there any drivers that do not work at all (so they could be removed) or
that are built-in into chipsets that always contain a netboot-able BIOS
anyway (so are not needed on a generic floppy)?

- Any other suggestions? I noticed that other etherboot disks uses
SYSLINUX as boot loader. Replacing GRUB with SYSLINUX is no option for
me (unless SYSLINUX supports all the stuff i need from GRUB, and I doubt
that), but I'd chainload SYSLINUX if that made my life easier.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions,

Michael