Sven Luther said:

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

quoted

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
added to it, no ?

Do we have some documentation of the firmware limitations ?

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.

Surely if you make the default mkinitrd behaviour a bit more sensible
there won't be a problem.  A compressed 2.6 kernel is about 1.5MB, and
an initrd using MODULES=dep is about 1.5MB, which makes about 3MB,
giving a comfortable amount of space for future growth...

Cheers,

Leigh.