Subject: Installation...

From: Alex deVries <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 22:57:26 -0500 (EST)

Here's how I want to do it:

1. The user boots a kernel with ramdisk either 
   - with bootp (for those who don't have IRIX installed, or no disk 
     space for the RPMS)
   - by slapping the image on '/' of the Irix fs so ARC can see it.
   - by putting in the RedHat/MIPS CD and booting off of it

2. Upon bootup the kernel extracts the ramdisk image which is an
ultra-stripped down fs just like RH's existing boot disk.

3. The usual RH install asks questions about networks, source location,
packages, etc. The user can install from: NFS, SMB, local fs, or CDROM.

4. All the RPM's are installed.

5. Some boot magic happens to setup sash/arc/whatever so booting Linux
doesn't involve running anything in the text boot window.

We have the following problems:

1. There's no initrd in the kernel for MIPS yet.
2. The size of the offset of the image is limited to 11 bits, or 2048k.
It's easy to have a vmlinux kernel for MIPS that's larger than that, so
either: a) we need to get bzImage compression happening or b) we need to
use other bits in the options field to give a larger range.  IIRC, there
are a couple of unused ones in that set of bytes.
3. Life is _much_ better with modules, especially with EFS or SMB things.
4. Somebody needs to sort out sash magic.  

- A

-- 
      Alex deVries          Run Linux on everything,
  System Administrator      run everything on Linux.
   The EngSoc Project       Send spam to [email-masked].