Sven Luther said: > On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 09:45:13AM -0600, Hollis Blanchard wrote: >> On Jan 5, 2005, at 5:47 AM, Sven Luther wrote: >> >On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 10:49:19AM +0100, Philippe Guyot wrote: >> >>>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. >> > >> >>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 ? > >> 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.
