Subject: Re: Diskless boot weirdness
To: maximum entropy <entropy@zippy.bernstein.com>
From: Matthias Drochner <drochner@zelux6.zel.kfa-juelich.de>
List: port-i386
Date: 05/20/1997 20:02:37
Excerpts from netbsd: 20-May-97 Re: Diskless boot weirdness Jonathan
Stone@DSG.Stanf (1694)

> When I tried
> >to build the boot prom (/sys/arch/i386/stand/netboot), genprom
> >complained that the boot image was too large (it was somewhere in the
> >neighborhood of 33k, and the rom size is 32k.)  Did something grow
> >very large in one of the stand libraries that suddenly broke all this
> >stuff?
> 
> I think libz was added after the netboot code was imported.  Libz is
> non-negligible given a 32k limit. You could try reconfiguring the
> Makefiles to not include libz.

libz needs nearly 16k.
I use 2 ways to get a non-decompressing ROM into 16k
or a decompressing ROM into 32k:
a) Use BOOTP/TFTP instead of RARP/BOOTPARAM/NFS. This is
  a bit smaller. It requires more efforts at the server, since the kernel
  additionally needs rarp and bootparam. I hope this will change.
b) As Jonathan said, nuke NFS symlink support. A patch for this
   is in PR misc/3335.

best regards
Matthias Drochner