10 Aug
2019
10 Aug
'19
6:23 a.m.
On Thu, Aug 08, 2019 at 07:52:04PM -0600, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
That's before my time. If I remember correctly,
by the time I was creating
boot+root disks it was the kernel plus something—I don't remember if it was
an initramfs or an initrd—concatenated together. I also remember having to
use a utility to update the kernel to tell it where the something started.
Which was really based on how big the kernel was as padding before the
something started. That was probably 2.<something> on Slackware in '99.
In 1993 Fred van Kempen (who did the original Linux TCP stack before I
got rewritten by Alan Cox's Net-2 stack) added a patch to the ramdisk
code which so the root file system would be loaded from a second
floppy into the ramdisk. That was because he wanted to fit more into
stuff into the root file system, and by using a second floppy, the
full 1.44MB could be used for the root file system in the ramdisk. As
I recall the kernel was also getting bigger than 512k, too.
In '95, Slackware started releasing on CD-ROM's, and while there may
have been boot/root floppies, I suspect more and more they were used
as rescue media, since installing from a CD-ROM was *way* more
convenient.
I'm guesing what you were doing was creating a kernel plus initramfs
which was sufficient to mount a root file system elsewhere as an
emergency "boot this failsafe kernel off the floppy", perhaps? I
don't think a kernel+initramfs on a single 1.44MB floppy would have
been sufficient for use as an install medium by '99. Or were you
making an emergency USB thumb-drive as a rescue device, maybe?
Cheers,
- Ted