[plug] testing nic

[Sham Chukoury]

On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 07:13, Ryan Smith wrote:

> Ok, I never thought of that.
> Would it be possible to make a kernel that has plug and pray? and still make it 
> fit in 8Meg of ram.

I always build in PnP support in my kernels.. with isapnp support as a
module. :P

Actually, even the kernel i boot usually (for my desktop machine, from
hard disk) seems small enough to fit onto a floppy.

-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         1.1M Nov 29 13:08
/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.23e-eleusis
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         1.4M Dec 22 20:03
/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.0-eleusis

OK, the 2.6.0 one seems a bit big. ;) But yeah, if you put in just the
bare essentials as built in and the rest either as modules (to be loaded
from a root floppy) or not built at all, the resulting kernel (bzImage)
should be roughly around 1MB or less.

Hmm, come to think of it.. RAM would be even more at a premium on a
machine with just 8MB available. The way I build my root floppies, the
ramdisk would take up 6MB! That's like, just 1MB left for processes to
use. =\ Actually, this is probably what's happening when you're using
the Debian installer floppies. IIRC, the Debian root filesystem for the
installer takes up 6MB. Yikes.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong. ;P

The boot floppy is rather easy to make - build a kernel small enough and
plop it onto the disk, then make the disk bootable. The tricky bit is
being able to cram enough stuff into a root filesystem that can be
loaded into ramdisk on boot.

§:)

p.s. Found on the Debian installation manual:
"You must have at least 12MB of memory and 110MB of hard disk space."

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-hardware-req.en.html
(Section 2.3)