Text 13771, 51 rader
Skriven 2009-12-29 13:37:58 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38)
     Kommentar till en text av Wayne Chirnside
Ärende: take a walk on the wild side
====================================
Hey Wayne!

> I'm going to have to look into hacking down the modules file
> in rc.d to see if I can get the kernel down to
> a size that'll load onto a floppy rescue disk.

If you're talking about slackware's rc.module then you probably can safely edit
out over 90% of it.  However it won't work the same with their initrd as the
rc's there are different since it is busybox based. My currrent usb flash disk
thingy is somewhat the same but I dropped busybox's archiving and compression
stuff in favour of the regular suspects which means that it's modprobe won't
work with compressed modules.  Therefore modules on my rescue system are a no
show and everything needed is built into the kernel.  That significantly
reduces the size of the overall ramdisk but it is still way beyond what will
work on a floppy.  In order to get the kernel to fit onto a floppy I'd have to
revert back to a 2.4 kernel or even a 2.2 kernel that is patched to handle more
modern hardware than was available when those kernel versions were current. 
Also no floppy drive here as I gave up on those ages ago. Same situation with
CD's now, thank goodness.  For older hardware where usb boots aren't an option
I just kickstart the boot/root ramdisk from a preconfigured ide drive and take
it from there.  Works way better than EVERYTHING else, especially floppies.

> For a crappy video card it's getting better all the time
> however it's a tad more of an education in video mode settings
> than I had planned on.

Without knowing beforehand what the card can do then much jiggery-pokery will
always be required.  The true beauty of the matroxfb is that every possible
option I can think of is covered as a parameter in that particular kernel
module which makes it powerful.  Once one knows what parameters will achieve
the goal it is a simple matter of either building that into the kernel or
putting the proper parameters into a modprobe on boot up.  Having already
looked at the possibilties of the nvidiafb driver I can see that it is
extremely handicapped and have already decided to avoid those cards.  I used to
like ATI cards but they have been on my
'avoid like the plague' list ever since pcie came out.  Very little of
consequence hardware-wise on that particular interface(s) and what is
attractive has nothing to do with graphics cards.  Networking and drives is all
I see and all that was working before pcie.  Mind you I like some of the pcie
sata and sas stuff but could easily live without it.

On another note, I see a few usb 3.0 controllers (pcie x1's) but no stock at
any of the retailers yet.  Still special order.  I doubt it is needed given
what little of consequence any version of usb has been. I imagine the blu-ray
people might want it.  :::shudder:::

Life is good,
Maurice

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