>
> O.k. If the goal is booting over the network, I currently have a
> netboot package that does dhcp and tftp. And downloads a kernel over
> the kernel and boots it. The ramdisk compressed was only 10k, last
> time I looked.
>
Is this the package formally known as etherboot? Or is it something you
wrote?
> For other kinds of booting control it should be relatively simple to
> build on top of a linux booting linux infrastructure.
>
Agreed.
> I can currently build a minimal 2.4.x kernel which compressed comes to
> about 360K. If I could get small enough to fit on a 256K rom I would
> love it but unfortunantely I can't do that today.
>
That's about where we've been able to get at this point.
> What kind of sizes are you seeing?
>
Adam Agnew is looking into a Linux kernel where they claim to have it down
to ~180KB. No idea what version it is yet. We've pretty much come to the
conclusion that we'll have to use an older kernel to get below
256KB. Fortunately, I don't think it will matter much.
> In general I'm interested in this area, and I'm really pushing to
> build a solid bottom layer on which all of these kinds of things can
> be built. If someone can build a better bootloader on top of the
> infrastructure I'm building, I'd love to see it (especially because
> you become multiple architecture almost effortlessly). Until then
> I'll just build the pieces as I go.
>
We should coordinate. We're just getting started here since it takes time
in a University to get things. But, we're hoping to start making some
real progress now that we have everything on hand.
bill
