43p-140 install issues

[Hollis Blanchard]

On Jan 5, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Philippe Guyot wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 January 2005 17:08, Sven Luther wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 09:45:13AM -0600, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
>>>
>>> The size of that partition depends on firmware limitations. I have
>>> definitely seen reports of systems not booting when the PReP boot
>>> partition was too large. I think on some systems that has even 
>>> happened
>>> at 8MB.
>>
>> Is the problem really the size of the partition, or the space used by 
>> the
>> kernel. I mean we could make a 100MB partition at start, and since we 
>> just
>> dd the kernel to it, the kernel would be found at the start of the
>> partition, and the firmware probably doesn't care about the real size 
>> of
>> the partition, as long as it can access all the kernel data we dded 
>> to it,
>> no ?
>
> I agree, see the IEEE P1275 on solinno's site. OF determines the load 
> image
> length and transfers only that. I was able to verify that by dumping 
> storage
> after a "load" when debugging boot process.

Are you specifically talking about booting from a PReP partition and 
not a floppy disk or netboot? Did you dump the bytes from the disk just 
after the kernel and see if they were also present in memory?

I have no doubt that OF will correctly load an ELF file, but a PReP 
boot partition does not contain an ELF file.

>> Do we have some documentation of the firmware limitations ?
>
> Yes, on solinnos's site.

That page (http://www.solinno.co.uk/7043-140/getstarted.php) doesn't 
mention any restrictions on the size of the PReP boot partition, so 
it's clearly not a complete list. :)

-Hollis