From: Shawn T. Rutledge (rutledge_at_cx47646-a.phnx1.az.home.com)
Date: Tue May 23 2000 - 20:10:29 EDT
On Tue, May 23, 2000 at 02:57:37AM -0400, George Caswell wrote:
> 1: (I could be wrong here, but) Don't statically link the PCMCIA-IDE driver
> into the kernel. I'm still new to PCMCIA on Linux but apparently Card
> Services is required to actually make that device show up as a /dev/hd? node -
> and Card Services doesn't like not being able to load the module.
Makes sense I guess.
> 2: LILO on the boot drive doesn't seem to work. I'd love to hear if anyone
> has LILO working to boot a 730. But it seems the Thinkpad BIOS support for
> PCMCIA drives just doesn't extend into the world of free software for some
> reason.
Well I don't have any problem with a DOS based loader... it might
even be a good idea on that kind of machine so I can run a few
(gasp) DOS programs too. And I've heard that those disks aren't
straightforward to get a FAT filesystem installed from scratch either.
It might be better to use fips to shrink the existing partition to
make room for an EXT2 partition. But that's a hunch at this point.
My attempts to date have been with the kind of Linux distro that just
runs off a FAT partition, not because that's particularly good but
because I didn't want to push my luck just yet.
>
> So I'm thinking my next attempts are gonna be along these lines -
> super-streamlined kernel, everything in modules except for the vitals - initrd
> and the filesystems. initrd image will run card services (which will
> hopefully find the drive, install the module, and allow me to boot) - from
> there, a regular root volume setup.
Yikes how do you even switch the root filesystem from the RAM disk to
the hard disk? Can that be done? If you keep the RAM disk and try
to mount the hard disk on top of it, you'd have a whole bunch of mount
points for the directories under root, right? Unless you can find the
kind of filesystem that allows you to transparently overlay one filesystem
on top of another. I think that has been done; saw an old 1.2 (?) kernel
patch for that. It was intended for cases when most of the filesystem
is on read-only media, but you still want to allow changes; the diffs
could be written to a writeable medium.
> For a bootloader, one version of DOS or another calling straight into
> loadlin. Since on startup the kernel image and initrd image will have to be
> in memory at the same time keeping it all small enough for the 8MB is key.
Well you can upgrade the memory. 8 meg and larger 5V DRAM cards show
up on ebay now and then. I got a couple of them.
>
> I'd love to hear if anybody has any useful input on this - and also whether
> BSD might be better equipped to run on this neat little machine.
That's a very good point; maybe its IDE driver is more universal.
BTW I would be most grateful if you help flesh out the Wiki at
http://cx47646-a.phnx1.az.home.com:9673/zwiki/SlateComputers/ThinkPad%20730T
(which is reachable by clicking the link at
http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud/730T/ )
-- _______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD ecloud_at_bigfoot.com (_ | |_) http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud kb7pwd_at_kb7pwd.ampr.org __) | | \________________________________________________________________ Get money for spare CPU cycles at http://www.ProcessTree.com/?sponsor=5903
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