[syslinux] Question on Kernel boot options

[Murali Krishnan Ganapathy]

Since you have a CD there should not be any immediate space issues. In 
my opinion the best solution will be to build only the absolutely 
essential things into the kernel and keep everything else as modules. At 
boot time, you can pass options to the boot command line to 
enable/disable certain modules. All the options passed at boot time not 
understood by the kernel is available in /proc/cmdline. So your init 
scripts can use them and to decide whether to load certain kernel modules.

All your users need is to pass in the right boot time options. But even 
that can be simplified by creating a menu of commonly used combinations 
and let the expert users to try various combinations. This way you will 
need very few kernels (in the ideal world only one).

- Murali

Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> I have a project that uses syslinux to load the kernels from the CD to create 
> disk and/or partition images. The process works great, but as I have been 
> building newer kernel images with new disk and nic drivers, I have had users 
> run into problems.
>
> Example: one users machine would fail at hotplug detection, creating a 
> kernel with this feature off worked. Another user had a problem wth the 
> cs8900 nic, and a  few others. Not many since I had 9,000 downloads of the 
> program in November for the last release, but I don't know how many of 
> those were downloads to use it, and how many mght have had problems, 
> and just not contacted me. 
>
> I was wondering is using the isolinux.cfg to setup kernal boot options to have 
> a limited number of kernels, but provide additional configurations. Each 
> kernel is about 5MB, so limiting number cuts down on the image file. 
>
> I've tried this by adding the debugboot option, but didn't see much differece 
> in the boot process, perhaps a few additional message lines, but my 
> machines don't get an error.
>
> Thanks for any information.