On Tuesday, March 8, 2005, at 10:11 PM, Andy Ruhl wrote:
>
> I had thought that less is better at one point, but since the
> bootloader works and you can have a kernel any size, it's not really a
> problem. Probably wouldn't hurt at all to submit some kernel conf
> files though.
>
> One thing that would be nice is to get some of the more common stuff
> into the kernel. I tried to get a USB card working at one point (PCI
> card, obviously), but it didn't work...
>
> But maybe this is due to a PCI bus bug?
>
> Anyway, I'm rambling now. It would be really nice to see whatever is
> possible to support on PCI and USB, to support it. I kind of agree
> that the scsi stuff should probably go away. At least the broken
> stuff. If people really want that they should re-compile.
>

On my 1.6.1 kernel, I have a few things implemented that I just haven't 
got around to setting up yet.

I've got a compatible SCSI card, I want to do pppd, my only networked 
laser printer is accessible via appletalk so I want to look into 
netatalk (although I'm not sure netatalk supports printing, but it 
would be handy to have netatalk up to talk to my macs as well), etc.  
In short when setting up 2.0 I want to keep a bunch of stuff enabled, 
and that kernel is a lot bigger than the 1.6.1 IIRC.

Your (Andy's) post on Mar 8 mentioned that the bootloader can now be 
any size.  This is the first I recall reading of that, so I searched my 
list folder for "bootloader" and found this from Dale in July 2004(!):

------------
The cobalt "bios" is actually a linux kernel in rom.  It definitely
has some size limitations, both compressed and uncompressed.  Search
the archives of this list for more info.

To get around these problems, the current netbsd "rescue" disk installs
a netbsd bootloader but renamed as vmlinux.gz so the linux firmware
can load/run it.  It does not have the size limitations that the
firmware loader has.  It (of course) knows about netbsd partions and
netbsd kernel names, so you don't need to fiddle around with copying a
new kernel to the linux partition anymore.
-------------

What I'm not clear on, to which "rescue" CD is he referring?  I had 
gathered that the netboot CD that Dennis made had this limitation, at 
least an existing limitation was brought up on the list a few times not 
that long ago.

So, those of us who are using the "old" system from Dennis' restore CD, 
can we just grab the
.iso from the current 2.0 restore CD effort, put the new vmlinux.gz 
into the linux partition on our existing system, and then compile 2.0 
kernels as large as we wish?  Or do we even need to make any change on 
the linux partition?

I'm now reasonably comfortable with the idea of upgrading to 2.0 myself 
without using the restore CD; I'm a little concerned about the few 
people working with 2.0 file corruption issues though, so was waiting a 
bit yet to actually jump.  I have all the stuff downloaded and ready to 
go, though.

Thanks,

Brian