Hello, Edmund!
On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS wrote:
> I tried linking GRUB with OSKit last night. This caused stage2 to
> become very large (410*512 bytes), and it stoppped working. Is there a
> hardwired limit to the size of stage2? The libraries were being
> dragged in by a single function call, that wasn't itself being
> executed, so either it's failing because stage2 is too big, or there
> is something subtle happening with the linker. If I comment out the
> single function call, it works again.
It is very important that you tell us which of three methods of installing
GRUB you were using:
1) dd to floppy
2) install stage1 + stage2 by grub shell or another stage2
3) install stage1 + stage1_5 + stage2 by grub shell or another stage2
It would be good if the documentation mentioned that there are three
methods. It not the first message that lacks this important information.
The method 1 will fail unless you increase the number of sectors to be
loaded by stage1 or upgrade GRUB to the latest CVS version that does it
automatically.
The method 2 may fail if stage2 is too fragmented on the filesystem.
The method 3 will almost certainly work with big stage2. stage1_5 loads
stage2 using the same routines that stage2 uses for loading huge FreeBSD
kernels.
> I admit to using a slightly old version of GRUB from CVS, because the
> lastest one seems to require a new binutils, and I wasn't in the mood
> for installing one straight away. So I'm really asking if there has
If you are using _so_ old GRUB and binutils, you should certainly upgade
both.
Actually, you just need to replace "as" and maybe "objcopy". No need to
replace "ld"
> recently been a hardwired limit to the size of stage2 that I should
> know about.
There should not be a size limit, but there may be a "fragmentation
limit", although it's quite unlikely that it's the problem that you have.
Pavel Roskin
