Re: APUS Debian Boot-Floppies Images and bugs

[Michel <mic...@ii...>]

Alan Buxey wrote:

> > I already considered all this and am now at 848 K. How much space exactly
> > do we have?
> 
> well, if we need the following
> 
> s:startup-sequence  - a few bytes...
> libs:ppc.library   (for powerup - not needed for A1200, but for a3k/a4k
>                     a1200 has this in ROM)
> *or* we go with WarpUP....which ever has the smallest libraries
> envarc:  a few bytes of required env: variables for WarpUP (if used)
> the boot tool   (eg one i'm working on.....) tens of K
>                          could be compressed (eg with stonecracker) if
>                          needed)
> bootstrap + the bootstrap_pup or bootstrap_wup  - 100's of k's
> 
> How much fits onto one 880K formatted disk, i cant recall, its been so
> long....is it 856k?
> 
> I can see the kernel needing to be ~500k ....nasty....could 2.2.10 get
> this small?

I doubt it.

Brainstorming:

We could throw out _all_ disk drivers except that for the floppy; everything
else would have to be loaded as modules. This brings it down to 660K. OTOH the
modules will take lots of space; is there some kind of limit, e.g. from the
ramdisk size?

We could make one floppy with just the kernel on it and another one which
boots, copies everything to RAM: and... you get the idea.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper)    \   Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc) developer
CS student, Free Software enthusiast   \        XFree86 and DRI project member