On Jan 5, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Philippe Guyot wrote:

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

quoted

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

quoted

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.

Are you specifically talking about booting from a PReP partition and 
not a floppy disk or netboot? Did you dump the bytes from the disk just 
after the kernel and see if they were also present in memory?

I have no doubt that OF will correctly load an ELF file, but a PReP 
boot partition does not contain an ELF file.

quoted

Do we have some documentation of the firmware limitations ?

Yes, on solinnos's site.

That page (http://www.solinno.co.uk/7043-140/getstarted.php) doesn't 
mention any restrictions on the size of the PReP boot partition, so 
it's clearly not a complete list. :)

-Hollis