On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Thomas Seyrat wrote:
> > Does anyone on the list know how to make compressed sparc kernels? > > I can't see the point in doing such a thing. > > Sparc does not have the size limitation during boot associated to > C hardware, so, compressing the kernel is not really necessary as > to that matter. If you really have to compress it (hard disk > usage being a problem ?), well, gzip your vmlinux and try to boot that :-) Well, it's a diskless machine booting via tftp. But it doesn't like a tftpimage (probably not enough memory), and for one reason or another the downloading of the kernel is painfully slow (takes a few minutes to download the current 1.5 Mb standard kernel). About just gzipping: from what I gather from Makefiles of other platforms, you need to prepend some unzip-code to the kernel (piggyback). I can't find this one in the kernel tree either. Or does a gzip self-extracting archive suffice on the sparc platform (if such a thing even exists for gzip)? > > It however appears that some machines (slower Sparcs) don't really > like booting compressed kernels. Do they crash or just take long to uncompress? Mine would be in the mentioned category, being a Sparc IPC with 12 Mb ram. Tim.
