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

Tigran Aivazian (tigran@veritas.com)
Mon, 5 Feb 2001 17:25:33 +0000 (GMT)


On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Mr. James W. Laferriere wrote:

>
> Hello All , I like the warning Ladies & Gents . But when did it
> first appear ? I seem to have missed the announcement in the
> change logs . Tia , JimL

you mean when did Werner Almesberger add the check and a printf of the
warning you see below? I can't remember the date exactly but I remember it
very clearly (i.e. everything except the date :)

Basically, I badly needed to be able to build kernels of arbitrary size
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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