[cobalt-developers] Gentoo XTR rom kernel

["William L. Thomson Jr." <support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, 
	It looks like in my current situation I will not be able to boot from
disk. In order to do so I will have to take my 8 RAID5 partitions and
compact them together. Without doing the math, I am not sure exact what
the max limit is. With respect to the other hd and stuff the kernel must
load into memory.

	All staying within the 22MB memory limit when booting from disk. That's
based on the rom not being able to use more than 32MB and leaving the
remaining memory for the second kernel, the one on disk. To load
uncompress and get going. I really wish the rom could use more than 32MB
of memory.

	So I am left with one option at the moment sticking with my partitions
the way they are. That option is a custom kernel in rom.


Whoo scary sounding isn't it. Well I guess so. I was a little scared.
However the process outside of building the kernel is well documented
and straight forward. Thank's the the guys working on the Cobalt Rom
project at source forge. Which includes Duncan who has been helping out.
Thank you.

I have started compiling my own kernels staying within the 800kb limit.
So far it's going very well. My first one ended up ~650kb. Granted it's
specific for an xtr with ext3 support and raid5.

My second kernel is a little larger ~750kb. However I added a feature I
do not think most rom kernels have. That's module support.

Now compiled in my kernel is everything needed to boot. Once init has
taken over and file systems mounted, the rest of the needed stuff can be
loaded.

Granted I prefer to have things compiled into the kernel as opposed to
modules. Possible performance issues and etc. However in this case it
has allowed me to get my XTR boot with a recent kernel, specific for the
machine and services I am running on it. Which basically means I can go
ahead and use my XTR for now and be somewhat good to go.

Now I am not sure of the future possible issues this could bring on. It
will definitely make upgrading and installing new kernels more of a
pain. However unless someone else has a reason. I see no reason why the
machine could not be used this way for prolonged periods of time despite
upgrades and etc.

Is it possible for the flash roms to go bad by to many flashing's?

Is it not good to use a rom kernel instead of one on disk?

-- 
Sincerely,
William L. Thomson Jr.
Support Group
Obsidian-Studios, Inc.
http://www.obsidian-studios.com