Re: Linux2.4.1-pre1, Kernel is too big for standalone boot from floppy

From: Tigran Aivazian (tigran@veritas.com)
Date: Mon Feb 05 2001 - 12:30:11 EST


On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Tigran Aivazian wrote:
> Basically, I badly needed to be able to build kernels of arbitrary size

not just "to build", but "to boot", of course :)

Also, while we are in a history lesson, I might as well add that this was
precisely the time when he (Werner) replaced the monstrously hardcoded
initial page table with the one generated "automagically" -- hence the
source file size went down dramatically...

> and I asked someone who I was sure would know (Werner) how to fix it --
> and I was right -- he did know and he fixed it so now one could build very
> large kernels and have them booted via LILO. But, the old plain bootsect.S
> was still left as is, i.e. unable to boot very large kernels (for exact
> size limits see the source, arch/i386/boot/tools/build.c) and so it was
> only natural that one should printf a warning.
>
> So, in short, such kernels are okay to boot with LILO (and most other
> bootloaders) but not if you just dd if=bzImage of=/dev/fd0, i.e. not by
> bootsect.S
>
>
> If you want the date... it was approximately the beginning of 2000, I
> think.
>
> Regards,
> Tigran
>
>
> >
> > make[2]: Leaving directory
> > `/usr/src/linux-2.4.2-pre1/arch/i386/boot/compressed'
> > gcc -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -o tools/build
> > tools/build.c -I/usr/src/linux/include
> > objcopy -O binary -R .note -R .comment -S compressed/bvmlinux
> > compressed/bvmlinux.out
> > tools/build -b bbootsect bsetup compressed/bvmlinux.out CURRENT > bzImage
> > Root device is (8, 1)
> > Boot sector 512 bytes.
> > Setup is 4512 bytes.
> > System is 1418 kB
> > warning: kernel is too big for standalone boot from floppy
> >
> > +----------------------------------------------------------------+
> > | James W. Laferriere | System Techniques | Give me VMS |
> > | Network Engineer | 25416 22nd So | Give me Linux |
> > | babydr@baby-dragons.com | DesMoines WA 98198 | only on AXP |
> > +----------------------------------------------------------------+
> >
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>
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