Re: Debian GNU/Hurd installation
On Mon, Jul 26, 1999 at 09:48:08PM -0400, Roland McGrath wrote:
> There is support in both grub and serverboot for uncompressing gzip or
> bzip2 files. So you can compress the kernel and serverboot (loaded by
> GRUB), and ext2fs.static and ld.so (loaded by serverboot).
Oh, way cool.
> There are also the gunzip and bunzip2 store classes supported by libstore
> (i.e. the filesystems such as ext2fs.static). These are read-only not
> general-purpose, because they just uncompress the whole image into memory,
> but just fine for a compressed filesystem image that fits on a floppy (the
> assumption being that the uncompressed image will fit in memory).
Mmmh. This may be useful for the root filesystem on the second disk then,
which will carry the installation program as well.
> Once upon a time there was a hack to gunzip shared libraries in ld.so, but
> I think it has been lost and would need more hackery to get working again
> anyway.
Not needed. If the zip'ed stuff is on the first disk, we can compress the
second disk as a whole. There is no need to zip individual files inside this
then. So I understood correctly that libstore would turn the zip'ed disk
image into sort of a unzip'ed ram-disk filesystem? However, we might need
_some_ writable space for temporary state data (I am not sure).
Is the file system in memory really read only or do you only mean that it
can't be written back? If it could be turned into a writable ram disk,
that's all we need really.
> The scripts Miles wrote in the release/ dir of the hurd source tree can be
> used to make minimal versions of shared libraries (these scripts probably
> have some bit rot).
I will take a look.
> Between that and compressing the whole root filesystem
> image, and separately compressing gnumach, serverboot, ext2fs.static, and
> ld.so, it might all get small enough to cope with.
Yes, definitely. I think we will be able to do with two disks + base.tar.gz.
We don't need much in the root filesystem, at least in the beginning.
For useful installation disk, we also need a working fdisk. Anything else
beside the installation program itself?
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org finger brinkmd@
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org master.debian.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de for public PGP Key
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ PGP Key ID 36E7CD09
Reply to: