boot.iso with stage2

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 03:12 -0400, Louis E Garcia II wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 20:15:53 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 17:20 -0400, Louis E Garcia II wrote:
> > > If I placed stage2.img inside the boot.iso from rawhide and burned it
> > > would it act like a rescuecd? would the installer find stage2 in the cd
> > > instead of downloading it.
> > 
> > If you take a look at /usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/mk-rescueimage, you can
> > do basically the exact manipulations.  But yeah, the above is basically
> > correct
>
> I know this has been covered before but why is the installer in two stages?
> Both stages can fit on a CD easily.

The first stage has to be in RAM as an initramfs while the second can
just be mounted and used[1] without requiring much of a memory hit.
Also, if you're booting the installer via PXE, it helps to minimize the
amount you have to download via tftp

Jeremy

[1] At least, if you're doing an NFS, CD or hard drive install