From: "Gordon W. Ross" <gwr@mc.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 96 13:17:36 EST
Message-Id: <9603131817.AA03675@bach>
To: perry@piermont.com
Cc: Chris_G_Demetriou@ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu, developers@NetBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <199603131540.KAA00207@jekyll.piermont.com> (perry@piermont.com)
Subject: i386 boot - an immediate solution
Sender: owner-netbsd-developers@NetBSD.ORG
Precedence: first-class

Chris G Demetriou provided the useful data:
> i386 kernel sizes:
> 	kernel		'ls' size	'size' total
> 	------		---- ----	------ -----
> 	INSTADP		776280		759396

Then Perry asks:
> Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 10:40:32 -0500
> From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>

> However:
> 
> 1) Floppies have lower capacity once formatted.
> 2) once you put init, copy_kernel and a few other things on the
>    disk, you only have room for about a 720k kernel.

This makes it clear to me that the simplicity of my earlier
proposal was not obvious to all who read it.
(I dearly love simple things! 8^)

It has been pointed out that Perry needs a solution NOW.
The easiest way, by far, to solve this problem is to do
as I proposed before.  Let me summarize the main points:

* Move everything except the kernel from the current
  "kernel copy" disks onto a new, generic "rootdisk"

* Change mountroot in the INST* kernels to prompt and wait
  for the user to insert the new "rootdisk."  It's trivial:
	if (major(rootdev) == FD_MAJOR) {
		printf("Please insert the ROOTDISK, then\n");
		printf("press any key to continue...\n");
		c = cngetc();
	}

That's almost all you need to do.  (You might, want to modify
some later installation scripts to ask for the boot disk again
in order to copy the kernel from there, but that's optional.)

Note that the ONLY things on the boot disk after this change
would be the kernel and a boot program.  No init, no crunched
user-level programs, nothing else whatsoever.  This should
leave enough room for larger kernels for quite some time.

I really doubt there is any easier immediate solution.  Yes,
this means one additional disk, but that could be improved
later, after someone comes up with an acceptable method for
loading compressed kernels or filsystems or whatever...

Gordon