boot disk

[Dan Carpenter]

On 5/16/05, Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:
> 
> Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (4) no longer support booting
> from floppy disks.

Since 1.4M is no longer the max size what is the new max size that we
will allow the initrd to be?  I'm asking this because there is a lot
of masochistic code in the initrd and now that we don't use boot
floppies, it may not be needed any more.

It would be cool to put a small busy box shell in the initrd so that
you could have a shell prompt right away.  You could use this to
modprobe drivers and type lspci and basically manually fix things the
same as you do in other busy box boot environments.

At work we have a hacked up initrd so that we can put driver disks
directly into the initrd.  A lot of systems don't have a floppy or
cdrom and if it's a scsi driver you can't store it on the drive. 
These days I guess everyone would use USB, but that's slow and hands
on where our solution is awesome and completely automated.

There are probably other ways the initrd could be made more useful now
that we don't have to deal with the 1.4M limit in the stock install.

regards,
dan carpenter