On Wednesday 05 January 2005 17:08, Sven Luther wrote:

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 09:45:13AM -0600, Hollis Blanchard wrote:

quoted

On Jan 5, 2005, at 5:47 AM, Sven Luther wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 10:49:19AM +0100, Philippe Guyot wrote:

quoted

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BTW, i have another question. I am trying to fix debian-installer to
create
the prep partition, but i would like to have some info on the
expected
constraints of said partition. Some tell it has to be entirely in
the first
8MB, others the first 5MB, and my powerstack has a 17MB boot
partition
right now.

All I can say, it's that my boot PReP partition is the 1st and about
4 MB in
size (cannot size it less than 1% of the disk.....)
second partition is /
third is swap.

BTW, for debian, it makes more sense to have the second partition as
swap, and
the third as /, i think, since it was decided some time back to
default to
root=/dev/sda3, and not sda2.

quoted

That works for me.

Until the kernel grows beyond 4MB.

The size of that partition depends on firmware limitations. I have
definitely seen reports of systems not booting when the PReP boot
partition was too large. I think on some systems that has even happened
at 8MB.

Is the problem really the size of the partition, or the space used by the
kernel. I mean we could make a 100MB partition at start, and since we just
dd the kernel to it, the kernel would be found at the start of the
partition, and the firmware probably doesn't care about the real size of
the partition, as long as it can access all the kernel data we dded to it,
no ?

I agree, see the IEEE P1275 on solinno's site. OF determines the load image 
length and transfers only that. I was able to verify that by dumping storage 
after a "load" when debugging boot process.

Do we have some documentation of the firmware limitations ?

Yes, on solinnos's site.

quoted

In other words, should you need more space than 4-5MB at some point in
the future, you cannot simply make a bigger boot partition.

8MB would be good, 4-5MB only would probably be a bit just.

Clear.

Friendly.
Felipe