[gentoo-dev] Boot Floppy z0r

[gentoo-dev] Boot Floppy z0r

[Mike Frysinger]

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i'm spent sometime developing a boot-floppy-generating script but seem to have 
hit some roadblocks ...
(1) i cant seem to get vmware to like the 1 disk version of a boot floppy ...
(2) i cant seem to find any floppy disks that arent corrupted :)
(3) i cant seem to figure out how to make 2.6.x *not* zero out a ramdisk after 
umounting it ... wasnt a prob in 2.4.x, but now it's a show stopper for me :/

so i think i'll release the scripts i have in order to get feedback from ppl 
who may have done this kind of thing before ... i myself have never made a 
bootable floppy before, this would be my first attempt :)

lets jump to it, the code: http://wh0rd.org/gentoo/boot-floppy/ ...
next, ill give some info on it ...
the script requires you have uclibc installed.  what is uclibc you ask ?  just 
goto http://www.uclibc.org/ ... basically it is a much smaller replacement 
for glibc ... smaller is better because we can get more stuff onto the 
floppy.  the script builds a floppy disk image with these packages (all 
compiled with uclibc): busybox, tinylogin, udhcp, e2fsprogs.  i basically got 
a working root system put together and wanted to get the floppy generation 
process down before adding more stuff.

so !  heres what i need !
(1) feedback on what you think should be better
(2) feedback on how to make a working floppy image (without using a floppy 
drive) ... utilizing a boot loader like grub is ok, but i wish i could get 
the dealie down where the first hundred blocks the kernel occupies while the 
rest of the disk is the rootfs ... and the kern just loads it for you ...

- -mike
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Boot Floppy z0r

[donnie berkholz]

On Thursday 24 July 2003 22:24, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> i'm spent sometime developing a boot-floppy-generating script but seem to
> have hit some roadblocks ...
> (1) i cant seem to get vmware to like the 1 disk version of a boot floppy
> ... (2) i cant seem to find any floppy disks that arent corrupted :)
> (3) i cant seem to figure out how to make 2.6.x *not* zero out a ramdisk
> after umounting it ... wasnt a prob in 2.4.x, but now it's a show stopper
> for me :/

Hmm, I'll try with vmware too. Not sure about the ramdisk stuff.

> lets jump to it, the code: http://wh0rd.org/gentoo/boot-floppy/ ...

Great, I'll take a look soon.

> so !  heres what i need !
> (1) feedback on what you think should be better
> (2) feedback on how to make a working floppy image (without using a floppy
> drive) ... utilizing a boot loader like grub is ok, but i wish i could get
> the dealie down where the first hundred blocks the kernel occupies while
> the rest of the disk is the rootfs ... and the kern just loads it for you

I had a similar idea not long ago but I didn't have time to work on it; it
would be really cool to get kdrive onto this floppy so it has working X.
Kvesa compiled with -Os and glibc is ~1 MB; with uclibc presumably even
smaller. This ought to be able to fit onto a compressed ramdisk with the
other stuff if the kernel is small enough.

Everything I've heard about 2.6 says boot loaders are required; not in 2.4
though.

If you want to work together on this at all, let me know as I'm pretty
interested.

Donnie



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