Jonathan Stone wrote:

> 
> I think I meant  rx23, not rx33.
> 
> But yes, the Maxine has a flopppy controller chip attached via the
> ioctl asic, and the PROM doesn't support that for booting.
> If bob moved his SCSI floppy drive to the Maxine, that'd boot...
> if we had bootable floppy images, which (AFAIK) we don't.
> 
> If we use Simon's two-stage boot, we can get really aggressive
> about compression: use bzip2 on the kernel-plus-ramdisk-in-its-guts.
> I think just a gzipped kernel used to fit, a while back.

It should be ok - the current install.gz is 1174599 bytes and /boot is
another 40kB or so, so it should fit comfortably on a 1.44MB floppy.
For info:


	balrog:~ 102> ls -l netbsd.* ~/ramdisk.fs.*
	-rw-rw-r--  1 simonb   admin     1049848 Sep  5 15:59 netbsd.bz2
	-rwxr-xr-x  1 simonb   admin     1174599 Aug  7 23:41 netbsd.gz*
	-rw-rw-r--  1 simonb   admin      548991 Sep  5 15:58 ramdisk.fs.bz2
	-rw-rw-r--  1 simonb   admin      612722 Sep  5 15:57 ramdisk.fs.gz

bzip2 buys us a little, but (as I've mentioned on tech-install) you need
at least 2.3MB of RAM while decompressing (that's at half-speed, and
it's already slow!).  With stage2 loading at 7MB, this would require a
12MB machine.  Maybe it would be possible to load stage2 at 5MB - at the
moment the uncompressed kernel is around 3.6MB...

> Anyone know why the ramdisk image is getting so darn bloated?

In /usr/src/distrib/pmax/ramdisk on the 1.4.1 build machine:

	vlad:distrib/pmax/ramdisk 130> size obj.pmax/*.lo | sort -n | tail
	29800   432     18752   48984   bf58    obj.pmax/disklabel.lo
	41848   1456    271884  315188  4cf34   obj.pmax/newfs.lo
	66488   784     904     68176   10a50   obj.pmax/ed.lo
	69784   1664    7397    78845   133fd   obj.pmax/tip.lo
	72584   2688    329007  404279  62b37   obj.pmax/gzip.lo
	90456   816     888     92160   16800   obj.pmax/fsck_ffs.lo
	104792  704     40008   145504  23860   obj.pmax/pax.lo
	106136  12448   34324   152908  2554c   obj.pmax/sysinst.lo
	125688  4496    24992   155176  25e28   obj.pmax/ftp.lo
	145624  3632    2984    152240  252b0   obj.pmax/sh.lo
	vlad:distrib/pmax/ramdisk 131> ls -l obj.pmax/ramdiskbin
	-rwxrwxr-x  1 root  wsrc  1822996 Aug  7 23:33 obj.pmax/ramdiskbin*

There's some big stuff there...  If we really want to get serious, we
can do a couple of things - we don't need a full-featured shell or ftp
client (sure it's nice), pdtar on a pmax is a total of 26k text and
data (we could probably strip the archive creation stuff if we get
desparate), and so on.

Simon.