Re: [9fans] how small can you get (fwd)

Re: [9fans] how small can you get (fwd)

[Ronald G Minnich]

Just wanted to mention some reaction to the "small kernel" posting from
this list.

This "make the kernel small" silliness is necessary because FLASH parts on
motherboards have gotten *smaller*, rather than *larger*, in the last 18
months, and to top it off the vendors aren't even wiring up all 19 address
lines to the parts that are there -- just 18. Disk On Chip is increasingly
become hard to use due to the move from DIP32 to QFP packaging. So due to
packaging and flash size constraints we are looking at 256KB flash for a
while. As a result we need itsy kernels.

Plan9 so far is the "itsy kernel" winner.

Also the "fallback image" Eric mentions is an etherboot bios that runs if
things are really broken.

ron

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 09 Feb 2002 06:33:09 -0700
From: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederman@lnxi.com>
To: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
Cc: linuxbios@lanl.gov
Subject: Re: [9fans] how small can you get (fwd)

> yes but note this thing includes tcp and ssl for boot. It's pretty
> interesting.

And it had SMP support compiled in, so there is some hope.

In any event.  What I would call a real target is to get the bootloader down
to 160K (kernel + user space + decompression code).  If whatever we
use can hit that mark we can have 2 copies of LinuxBIOS in the ROM, one
setup as a fallback image.  And one setup with as the normal case with
a nice bootloader.

Eric