SILO limits and requirements

SILO limits and requirements

[Rev. G. Lim]

Greetings.

I have some SILO questions and hope that this is the correct list in which
to ask them. If not, I apologize; I got here from sparc-boot.org site.

Here goes:
1. Is it correct to say that SILO can only read kernels from ext2/3,
with UFS planned for the somewhat near future? IOW, it cannot boot a
kernel located on ReiserFS or XFS or JFS.

2. I understand the 3M limit on kernel size, and I understand that there
is a practical limit of 2.5M... I am using silo-1.4.13. Does that limit
come from SMALL_RELOC in Rules.make? If so, what is LARGE_RELOC for?

3. On my systems, of the several versions of silo, second.b has always
been just less than 64k in size. Would it be worth it to set SMALL_RELOC
to 0x2E0000 to gain an extra 384k? That would leave 128k for second.b,
instead of 512k. Would it be safe?

4. What's the practical limit on the size of an initrd? Is there any way
to increase it?

Thanks for reading! Please answer if you know. The answers don't seem 
to be directly available from the website.
-Greg Lim

PS. I am not subscribed to the list, but I will try to watch it. My email
address is like: (galima@saunasmoake.org) but it doesn't have the letter
'a' in it anywhere.

Re: SILO limits and requirements

[Jan Engelhardt]

Hi,


On Feb 20 2007 18:37, Rev. G. Lim wrote:
>
>Here goes:
>1. Is it correct to say that SILO can only read kernels from ext2/3,
>with UFS planned for the somewhat near future? IOW, it cannot boot a
>kernel located on ReiserFS or XFS or JFS.

Yes, but all dynamic bootloaders that walk filesystems have that problem. You
cannot boot from HFS with GRUB at this time. Or ADFS. (Not that they would be
important, but the idea is - you need a fsdriver).

On the other hand, static bootloaders like LILO work straight away since they
read raw blocks. Then again, this does not work with encrypted filesystems or
with filesystems that relayout files (reiser4 perhaps).


Jan
-- 
ft: http://freshmeat.net/p/chaostables/