[Wlug] New ULTRA1 success - almost

[Adam Gomes]

Ahhh ... one lovely advantage to Sparc, is that it doesn't have the same
silly size limitations that x86 does. So ... _don't_ worry about the
size of the kernel. If you have room in memory, it will load. In fat, my
own kernel on my Ultra 10 is 3.3MB. That's one reason why there is no
"make zImage" for sparc. Of course, a smaller kernel means lower memory
utilization, and that of course has its own benefits, but it's not
necessary to do all that slimming that is needed for x86. Also, if you
want to save some space on your disk, at the cost of a little bit of
speed at boot time, you can just gzip -9 your kernel. I did this,
myself. The SILO boot loader is smart enough to notice that it is a
gzipped image and just decompress it itself. 

See on my own machine:

gomer at callisto:/boot$ ls -l vmlinuz*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root      20 May 18  2005 vmlinuz ->
vmlinuz-2.4.18-sun4u
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1379575 May 18  2005 vmlinuz-2.4.18-sun4u
gomer at callisto:/boot$ file vmlinuz-2.4.18-sun4u
vmlinuz-2.4.18-sun4u: gzip compressed data, was "vmlinux", from Unix,
max compression

gomer at callisto:/boot$ cp vmlinuz-2.4.18-sun4u ~/kernel.gz
gomer at callisto:~$ gzip -d kernel.gz
gomer at callisto:~$ ls -l kernel
-rw-r--r--  1 gomer gomer 3371524 Apr 15 09:06 kernel
gomer at callisto:~$ file kernel
kernel: ELF 64-bit MSB executable, SPARC V9, version 1 (SYSV),
statically linked, not stripped

(not even stripped), lol.

So, please, don't lose any sleep over the size of your Kernel ... not on
Sparc64 at least.

--Adam

On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 17:51 -0400, Eric Martin wrote:
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> 
> I realize I may need to qualify my last post.  by 'Make as many modules
> as possible' I meant what Mike said.  Anything that you don't need to
> get the root filesystem is a good candidate for a module.
> 
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On Friday 13 April 2007, ken jones wrote:
> >> Should I take this warning seriously?
> > 
> > last i recall playing with my sparc the answer is yes
> > 
> >> How do I figure out which drivers to deselect from menuconfig?
> > 
> > modularize ... turn everything you dont need to actually open the root 
> > filesystem and get network access into a module ... well, maybe not 
> > everything, but you get the hint
> > 
> >> lspci gives me no response.  I am not sure what is in my machine.
> > 
> > i imagine your sparc is one with some older sun-specific bus so lspci wouldnt 
> > walk it
> > -mike
> > 
> > 
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