[syslinux] Size limit for initrd in PXELINUX?

[Duetsch Thomas]

Hi,

I tried some other stuff and it seems to be a problem of my hardware,
because it works on a standart PC. I'm using a special server which has only
512 KB of free memory in the first 1 MB instead of 640 KB. So that's
probably were the problem is. Do you know how much memory pxelinux.0 needs,
and if there is a way to get it to work within the space that I have left?
Is there an (compile) option to tell pxelinux to use only the first 512 KB
and not to rely on the BIOS information. Just in case the BIOS provides
incorrect information.
If there is no such option available, do you think there is a way to change
the soure code, so that it would work. And if there is, do you have any
idea, were to start looking?
Oh, and regarding the "don't know why" thing, did you init your image with
zeros before making the filesystem? That helped to pack it down on my
system.

Regards,

_tom

-----Original Message-----
From: Josef Siemes [mailto:jsiemes at web.de]
Sent: Dienstag, 22. Oktober 2002 07:53
To: syslinux at zytor.com; Duetsch Thomas
Subject: Re: [syslinux] Size limit for initrd in PXELINUX?


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

________________________________________________________________
Keine verlorenen Lotto-Quittungen, keine vergessenen Gewinne mehr! 
Beim WEB.DE Lottoservice: http://tippen2.web.de/?x=13