[syslinux] Size limit for initrd in PXELINUX?

[Josef Siemes]

Hi,

Duetsch Thomas <thomas.duetsch at siemens.com> schrieb am 21.10.02 22:53:03:
> I did compiled the kernel with support for up to 256 MB of RAM disk (that is
> the intended size). It is a 2.4.9-31 kernel from Redhat.
> The pxelinux version I'm using is 1.76 from kernel.org.

seems ok.

I just tried it with pxelinux 1.76, Kernel 2.4.19 and a 64M initrd filesystem. If I put few data
in it I get a size of ~32M (don't know why, the original filesystem only has 3,5 M allocated 
- but that's a different problem). This works. I filled it up with /dev/urandom-data, and
the compressed initrd gets up to ~61M. This also works.
 
> I only seem to have problems, when the initrd file I'm downloading exceeds a
> certain filesize (somewhere between 8 and 12MB).
> I did build a diskimage which was originally 128 MB but did contain very
> little data, so it was only about 1 MB, when gzipped.

So the problem seems to be somewhere else. Maybe you could try a newer kernel? I
seem to recall that older 2.4-kernels had problems with big initrd's. But you should have
seen the 'Ready.'-prompt from pxelinux, regardless from the kernel version. What tftp server
do you use? Did you try to tftp the initrd from some commandline tool? There are tftp-hpa
versions that can't deal with big files (>32M - this is a point where the tftp block count
wraps to 0).

BTW, I haven't used tftp-hpa with my tests, but an IBM tftp server.

> BTW, are you German (because of your email adress)? Because if you are, it
> might be easier to write in German, because thats where I'm from as well.

I'm german, but as long as we cc: the list it would be better to stick to english ...

Regards,

Josef

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