On Thursday, September 23, 2004, at 06:45 PM, Sven Luther wrote:
On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 06:30:48PM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
On Thursday, September 23, 2004, at 06:13 PM, Sven Luther wrote:
I understand the size constraints. But isn't that the reason why
we added the "root-2" floppy? Would adding hfs and/or hfsplus kick
us over the edge into "root-3" land?
We could indeed add it to root-2, but i would prefer to get the
floppy loading
work correctly before i do this rather cosmetic thing working. And
hfs/hfsplus
without ide/scsi driver is not really all that useful, isn't it.
OK. I think see the logic. I'm not clear on what comes from where
as far as drivers and install components. Can you give me a
general picture? (Seemingly, "net-drivers" and "cd-drivers" are
obvious, but maybe not?) In particular, how are things that
*aren't* on a particular floppy retrieved, and how does it know
which of those to retrieve? Also, is there a general rule for what
goes on "root", "root-2", one of the "drivers" floppy, or over the
web?
They are not, we need to find out a rule for those. Floppies are
mainly worked
and tested on x86, which have not the size problem we have.
In root needs to be everything to load the rest of the floppies
(the floppy
driver and retriever) and the most of the other stuff. That is the only
constraint. We put in root-2 the rest of the non-driver stuff, in
the net
drivers the network drivers, and in the cd drivers the
ide/scsi/cdrom/disk/filesystem stuff, needed to make the cdrom work and
retrieve more stuff from there.
For the rest of it, it is up to us to take decisions.
Let me see if I've got this right -- please correct me if I've
misunderstood:
BOOT) The "boot" floppy has the kernel and miboot loader stuff
(fake "System" that's really a boot-loader, and empty "Finder").
That's all there is and it pretty much fills up the disk, even with
a severely stripped-down (anorexic?) kernel. For what it's worth,
there is about 169 K left.
ROOT) The "root" floppy has enough on it to talk to the console and
keyboard (at least as far as being able to tell <cr>, the <space>
key, the arrow-keys, and the <tab> key -- none of which depend on
locale) set the locale, and finally, load the "root-2" floppy.
That pretty much fills the floppy.
There's about 160 K left on root of "compressed" space: equivalent
to [maybe] 570 K of "uncompressed" space assuming a compression
ratio similar to that of the current contents -- about 1:4. The
largest single file is "libc". After that is /var/lib/dpkg/info,
/bin/busybox, and /usr/lib/locale. Together these account for
about 1/3 of the "uncompressed" space. The remaining 2/3 is lots
of small potatoes -- nothing one can point to and say " That's big
and useless. Let's get rid of it!".
ROOT-2) The "root-2" floppy is a bunch of "udeb"s for all the
components that wouldn't fit on "root". [This is a good design,
but it requires that "root" have everything needed to install a
udeb, making the "root" floppy even more crowded.]
The root-2 floppy seems to have about 600 K of free space. Since
udeb's are already compressed, there's no issue of "compressed" vs
"uncompressed" space on root-2.
Most of the stuff on root-2 seems to be for setting up the network
(The largest single file is "nic-extra-modules-2.4.27-powerpc-small-
di.udeb" -- 409 K, over half the total.) Some of that could,
theoretically, be moved to the net-drivers floppy, but what would
be the point? As long as root-2 is needed at all for overflow from
root, and there's free space on it, why not use it? However, it's
worth keeping this observation in mind if space on root-2 becomes
tight and net-drivers remains uncrowded.
The only stuff that really is absolutely required to be on root-2
is that which is (1) not absolutely required to be on root, and (2)
is needed for *both* a net-install *and* a CD-install. I'm not
knowledgeable enough about the details of d-i architecture to tell
which of the udebs on the present root-2 fits that criterion. Can
you give me some clues?
NET-DRIVERS) The "net-drivers" floppy, like root-2, is a collection
of udeb's. This represents everything (modulo the stuff that goes
on root-2 "because it's there") that is needed to get to the point
of being able to download stuff from the web. This includes
drivers for *all* sorts of network interfaces (PCI NIC cards,
wireless PC-card NICs for laptops, serial-IP for people who must
use modems, etc, etc...). It also includes things like
dhcp-client, choose-mirror, software for getting things over the
web, and so on. Most of this latter stuff seems to have landed on
root-2 for (guessing) historical reasons.
Currently, the net-drivers floppy has about 447 K of free space.
CD-DRIVERS) The "cd-drivers" floppy is also a collection of
udeb's. It represents everything that is needed to get to the
point of being able to load stuff off of a CD-ROM. The largest
single file is scsi-modules-2.4.27-powerpc-small-di.udeb, followed
closely by scsi-common-modules-2.4.27-powerpc-small-di.udeb.
Presumably, this reflects the fact that most CD-ROM drives are
*logically* SCSI drives, even if their physical connections are IDE
(ATAPI == SCSI commands over IDE wires). Most of the rest is also
device drivers. One further thing needed on the cd-drivers floppy
is the isofs file system driver, so we can locate and read the
files on the CD.
Currently, there is about 77 K of free space on the cd-drivers
floppy, making it the tightest of all.
FINALLY) We can assume that the CD-ROM (or the mirror-ed repository
on the Web) is large enough that we can put just about anything on
it that we might need -- after we get to the point where we can
access it freely.
Did I get that right?
Rick
