Booting Sequence Question - Puppy 4 Series

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john biles
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Joined: Sun 17 Sep 2006, 14:05
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Booting Sequence Question - Puppy 4 Series

#1 Post by john biles »

Hello Those who worked on Puppy 4.2.1's development,
With the release of Legacy OS 4 Mini Users have discovered that some PC's with 256Mb's of Ram are trying to load Legacy OS 4 Mini (476Mb iso) in to RAM that is too small causing a "Kernel Panic Error" What should be happening is Legacy OS 4 Mini (Puppy 4.2.1 Base) should see the RAM is too small and run from the CD only.
Now what has also been discovered is that for users with 128Mb of RAM only, Legacy OS 4 Mini does do as expected and runs from CD only.

Select the option "noram" at boot up makes no difference.

Logic says that as the iso started out around 125Mb's in size Developers set the load to RAM option based on this size. If any of you remember where this piece of code is and what lines to change, can you please reply to this post.
Any advice would be appreciated. If you know but can't be bothered to post that's alright as well, LOL! As I've said before, see post http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=76043 :wink:
Legacy OS 2017 has been released.

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Karl Godt
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Joined: Sun 20 Jun 2010, 13:52
Location: Kiel,Germany

#2 Post by Karl Godt »

initrd.gz : "gunzip/zcat|cpio -d -i" it and look for the init script :
#v405 decide whether to copy sfs's to ram...
COPY2RAM=""
COPYMSG='copying to ram' #purple
#v4.00 lowered rom 230000 to 220000... v403 added PUPSFSDEVMNTPT test... v404 explicit PCOPY needed...
[ $PUPMODE -eq 5 ] && PCOPY="yes" #well, override on first boot.
[ $PUPMODE -eq 77 ] && PCOPY="yes" #v406 multisession dvd.

#100406 this came about because aufs did not work if an sfs mounted via loop device as one layer
#was actually resident on another layer. however latest patched aufs may allow this...
if [ $KERNELSUBVER -lt 33 ];then
#v404 absolutely must copy to ram, otherwise layerfs conflict...
[ $PUPMODE -eq 6 -o $PUPMODE -eq 7 ] && COPY2RAM="yes"
[ "$COPY2RAM" = "yes" ] && COPYMSG='forced copying to ram' #purple
fi

#w482 lower this again, so multisession will work in 256MB system...
#[ $RAMSIZE -gt 260000 -a "$PCOPY" = "yes" ] && COPY2RAM="yes" #256MB system. note, only checking physical ram. w003 incr. from 220000.
[ $RAMSIZE -gt 220000 -a "$PCOPY" = "yes" ] && COPY2RAM="yes" #note, only checking physical ram.
Just a guess !
(Why the kernel looks for /init in intrd but for /sbin/init normally is a riddle but accepted by me .)

ICPUG
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Joined: Mon 25 Jul 2005, 00:09
Location: UK

#3 Post by ICPUG »

The guess is correct!

The kernel looks in initrd because initrd.gz is set as the initial ramdisk to boot.

init, within initrd.gz,gets executed to do all the setup stuff Puppy needs.

At the end of init a switch root is performed to setup the main file system from the layers of unionfs and Puppy is away!

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