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Andy,

> It seems like boot sometimes "just fails" and I can't really tell why.
> I know I built a 2.0 kernel recently that was bigger than the gzipped
> limit that the firmware can handle and I forgot about it... I think
> the generic 2.0-release kernel right now won't work on the Qube2
> because of this. But I've tried to build kernels that nfs boot and
> they don't get loaded by the firmware properly for whatever reason.

I'm no particular expert, but I don't think there's a firmware limit on 
kernels, but that depends greatly on the configuration of all the 
loaders that run befor ethe kernel actually boots.

For example, the loader chain goes something like this on 1.6/1.6.1:

1. Hardware/primordial loader (loads about 512 bytes off the disk)
2. Minimal software boot loader (loads a couple of K off the disk)
3. Kernel loader (loads the entire kernel off the disk)

The firmware would only impose the limit on the size of loader #2, which 
is by definition 512 bytes (I think).

Loader #2 is limited in scope by its own physical size, but can load a 
secondard loader (loader #3) of any necessary size.

Loader #3 has very few constraints except that loader #2 must be able to 
load it into a known good address space (recently changed to a lower 
address, to work with 16MB machines -- thanks, Dennis!) and still have 
room left over to load the kernel. If you have a 2MB loader (which is 
unreasonable, but I'll just use it for illustrative purposes), then you 
simply cannot have it load a 16MB kernel because the kernel would 
overwrite the loader's code in memory.

When assisting Dennis in fixing the aforementioned 16MB loader problem, 
he discussed using a re-locatable loader that could pull some dirty 
tricks to work under even the most unfortunate conditions -- like not 
having enough memory to load the loader and the kernel at the same 
time), or at least to detect the memory size and re-locate itself as 
high as possible to avoid clobbering the loader with the kernel.

How big is your 2.0 kernel?

-chris

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