Hello all,
I am attempting to install NetBSD on an old 486 to bring it back to life (for
fun). Because the default installation media created a kernel which was too
big, I needed to create my own custom boot media (two floppies modified from
the commented-out INSTALL_TINY kernel). One particular snag I encountered is
that my boot media always want to download a kernel named “kern-generic.tgz”
from the i386/binary/sets directory of my chosen mirror. This includes the
source tree that I compiled available on my home network.
For similar reasons, I needed to compile a custom kernel (based off of
GENERIC_TINY) so my 486 is usable. I have figured out from browsing the NetBSD
source tree that extra kernels can be included into the final release directory
on a server by modifying makefiles under ${NETBSD_SRC}/etc (/usr/src/etc),
which I found out purely by accident by Googling “$RELEASEDIR/binary/kernel”.
I want my custom kernel to be available both i386/binary/kernel and
i386/binary/sets- the default seems to be to place all kernels in
i386/binary/kernel, and only a subset in i386/binary/sets) . Therefore, I can
create a release directory on my home network and point my boot media to that
computer. However, I can’t seem to get sysinst to try to download any kernel
besides the seemingly-hardcoded kern-GENERIC.tgz. Is it possible to set an
option in the NetBSD source tree- in either the Makefiles or ./build.sh- to
create installation media that can choose from a list of possible kernels in a
release directory?
Currently, what I have to do is boot my installation media, open ftp, download
the kernel from my home network mirror under i386/binary/kernel, to the root of
my drive, reboot the installation media and run the install program, telling
the program to skip grabbing the kernel sources. This is error-prone and I have
already had to restart the 20-minute installation no less than 5 times .
Thanks for any help any of you can give me!
Sincerely,
--
William D. Jones
Rowan University | ECE | 2012
Member IEEE
Member Tau Beta Pi
[email protected]
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