Re: comments on the PASSWD and FLOPPY options?

[markus@infoscape.com]

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Ken Yap writes:
 > Ken Yap wrote:
 > > The file is in
 > >
 > > http://www.syd.dit.csiro.au/staff/ken/personal/etherboot/etherboot-3.2a.tar.gz
 > >
 > > It's not linked to the main page.
 > >
 > > The PCI and LANCE support might interest you if you have such cards.
 > >
 > >         Thanks, Ken
 > None of both, just good old ISA in the machine for which I do all this.
 >
 > I got your file.
 > It compiled perfectly. It gave errors when running. You changed D0000
 > into CC000 (I didn't read any docs so maybe you warned the user for
 > this).
 > It seems to work until I changed the makefile. I want PASSWD and FLOPPY
 > access. In the sequence of testing I got silly things. The files from
 > the menus was always /kernel.
 > I then started from fresh. Without FLOPPY and/or PASSWD everything went
 > fine on both my 3C509B and SMC/Ultra cards. As soon as I introduced
 > FLOPPY and or PASSWD the bootprogram hangs in the tftp section.
 > I only used all.lzcom together with comboot. Maybe I burn a prom but as
 > I will start holiday next week, there is probably no time for that. I
 > can't do it here, I have to go to another building for that.
 > FLOPPY isn't really necessary, I finally succeeded in understanding how
 > to use mknbi-blkdev, it wasn't directly clear from the manual. But I
 > want to avoid booting from floppy or local disk, so I need PASSWD.
 > I didn't check to use only PASSWD. I will do that tomorrow I thing. I
 > let you know.

This looks suspiciously as if there is not enough memory for all of
the drivers in the boot image. You will probably notice that when
compiling in fewer drivers and/or features, all of the problems
disappear. This is also the reason why "all.*om" does not include the
CS89x0 driver. Maybe recent additions have increased the code so much
that the options for the "all.*om" images have to be changed again.

In your case the solution is rather simple. Instead of using one of
the pre-configured images, build an image that includes exactly all of
those features that you really need. Last time that I tried, you could
safely enable all features and still have at least two network
drivers. If you are tight on memory, then the first thing to remove is
FLOPPY, because "mknbi-blkdev" renders it superfluous. I am aware of
the fact that it is currently very hard to tell whether you actually
run out of memory, unless you are one of the developers and know how
to interpret the memory layout. The output of "objdump" that you see
during the build process gives a basic idea, but maybe we will have to
come up with something else in the future. You cannot have more than
32kB for static and dynamic memory; this includes such things as the
stack, which is not directly visible in the output from "objdump"!


Markus

--
Markus Gutschke                         Internet: markus@infoscape.com
Infoscape, Inc                          Phone:    +1-415-537-3778
657 Mission Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94105

Disclaimer: The above message represents my personal opinion; It does
            not constitute an offical statement by Infoscape!

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