[OLPC-devel] just verified: 2306 + olpc + linux kernel works.

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 05:22:18PM -0600, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> 
> >The statically linked program results in 37112 bytes, and compressed
> >ext2 rootfs used as RAMDISK (olpc-boot-loader + necessary /dev files)
> >results in 19458 bytes.
> >
> >bzImage (no PCI, no USB, no networking) is about 380k in size,
> >compressed.
> 
> So we're three, right? Wow, Do you think once usb is in we will still be 
> under (512-64)*1024? This is pretty cool.

Taking into account that the real boot loader shall contain

- wireless firmware
- wireless driver
- IPv6 stack
- userspace code to talk over network (DHCP, TFTP, etc).
- framebuffer driver + nice graphical interface (images).
- USB

I'm skeptical about fitting such complete set into 512KB.

> Stupid question: a friend tells me there is a way to get a kernel build 
> that results in a Giant Elf that has kernel, initrd, command line in one 
> blob. Is this true ? I had not seen this (well, I've seen it on Plan 9, 
> but not on Linux).

Neither have I... it should not be hard though: stick the offsets of
such segments relative to the base binary image in the startup code.

But I don't see much point in doing that?

LinuxBIOS knows how the kernel's protocol for cmdline/ramdisk
configuration works, right?