[syslinux] Question on Kernel boot options

[Michael D. Setzer II]

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On 8 Jan 2006 at 21:35, Murali Krishnan Ganapathy wrote:

Date sent:      	Sun, 08 Jan 2006 21:35:28 -0600
From:           	Murali Krishnan Ganapathy <gmurali at cs.uchicago.edu>
To:             	"Michael D. Setzer II" <mikes at kuentos.guam.net>
Copies to:      	SYSLINUX at zytor.com
Subject:        	Re: [syslinux] Question on Kernel boot options

> 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.
> 
First thanks for the reply. Problem is that the system setup by the previous 
owner of the project had nothing setup for moduals. Everything was built in 
the bzImage file with no modules. With my systems, and most I believe, the 
kernel just continues  after trying to load something that doesn't exist. I've 
tried to find information on what would need to be in the kernel, and what 
isn't necessary for purposes of being able to access the disk/partitions, and 
the nics. 


> 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).
> 

Yes, having one kernel would be the best. The regular g4l image is about 
30MB, with 25MB being for the kernels. I have a test one with 4 more 
kernels that is about 50MB. 

Not an expert on building kernels, and didn't even get a reply from the kernel 
list. 

Again, thanks for the reply.

> - Murali
> 
> Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
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> > 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.
> 


+----------------------------------------------------------+
  Michael D. Setzer II -  Computer Science Instructor      
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