miniboot.iso (was: Re: Floppies for ALPHA)

[John Baldwin]

On 03-Aug-2003 David O'Brien wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 03, 2003 at 12:35:42AM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
>> On 03-Aug-2003 David O'Brien wrote:
>> > On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 12:42:49PM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
>> >> OK, the attached (trivial) patch can be used to create the
>> >> miniboot.iso.  Its contents is identical to what goes on the
>> >> miniinst.iso, except for NOT putting any distributions, docs,
>> >> and ports.
>> >> 
>> >> The uncompressed size for i386 is 46M, bzip2(1) compressed size
>> >> is 16M, which I think many people can afford.  (The size of the
>> > 
>> > What in the world is on this thing to be 46MB?!?!?!?  All 3 .flp's added
>> > together aren't this large.
>> 
>> It has GENERIC plus modules plus kernel.debug for CURRENT snapshots,
>> not BOOTMFS.
> 
> Then it has the wrong image for what we need.

It's the same kernel.  We just don't wast time building it twice.
I recall in the past that you were highly upset with wasting time
building things multiple times during release to the point of adding
hacks to the kernel build bits that I didn't like.

>> >> Jake, a question for you: can this miniboot.iso image be used on
>> >> sparc64 like on Alpha (as Wilko demonstrated) instead of the ugly
>> >> boot.flp image?
>> > 
>> > Why is making boot.flp "ugly"??
>> 
>> Because it uses a stripped down kernel with less support, and why
>> go through all the heartache to limit it's size when you can just
>> use a stock generic kernel?
>> 
>> T DAVID PLZ 2 B RELAX K PLZ THX
> 
> Whatever.  You guys keep missing the idea and I can only guess it is from
> lack of using a lot of non-i386 hardware.  Whatever.  I'm trying hard to
> make things better here from the mess we have today.

Erm, earth to David: I do happen to have some non-x86 hardware that I
have built native releases and done test installs with for both alpha
and sparc64.  I'm not as clueless as you claim on this one, and I am
watching what happens here.  Please chill.

> Sorry I can't read your mind on what is "ugly" about about boot.flp on
> the sparc.  Since dokern.sh didn't sed out anything from GENERIC, I'd
> love to hear an explanation on how the sparc64 boot.flp kernel is
> "stripped down" and isn't a "stock generic kernel".

Why build an exact duplicate of GENERIC, that's wasteful.  Besides, boot.flp
is intended to be a floppy.  I think what you want is to create a UFS disk
image of /R/cdrom/boot that is suitably bootable after the iso.1 stage.
Calling that disk image a floppy image is just wrong, since I don't imagine
that sparc64 machines have some magical 10mb floppy disk device.

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/