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<aggi>argh, shrinked tinycc-devutils.squashfs for support with isolinux, that happily loads it into ram

<aggi>however ~700MiB seems to much still, because kernel copies over /dev/initrd to /dev/ram0, and this gets stuck indefinitely

<aggi>3GiG RAM available, and there's no documentation which the maximum initrd size would be with linux-2.4

<aggi>because, i wanted to avoid a two-phase rootfs setup, and directly hook into root=/dev/ram0 with devutils.squahsfs below

<aggi>which does work, up to a certain size, but i don't know how much

<aggi>it's ok, i will do a two-stage root transition, with a minimal.sqashfs re-mounting a full rootfs

<aggi>but it's annoying

<aggi>and otherwise, for christmas i salvaged an ancient thinkpad t40, which is in very good condition, except battery, need to replace both the big battery and the cmos one

<aggi>this thinkpad t40 will be may tinycc distribution playground, it got 1 single-core clocked to lowest, and 512MiB RAM (which i'll upgrade to 2GiB for 5Euros_

<aggi>)

<aggi>some documentation suggest 0x37FFFFFF was some maximum address for initrd, that would be ~900MiB, my squashfs is 700MiB, no clue why kernel gets stuck while

<aggi>copying /dev/initrd to /dev/ram0

<aggi>this doesn't happen when a small 32MiB initrd is hooked into

<aggi>no error message, nothing, kernel just stucks, anyway, i got a workaround

<aggi>no need to buy a thinkpad t40, my tinycc distro will work just fine on most modern hardware

<aggi>it's just fascinating, a 20year old laptop remains rather useful

<aggi>it got a tiny LED lamp which can illuminate the keyboard in darknes, the display brightness is controlled independent from BIOS/ACPI, and it can be dimmed very low which i enjoy

<aggi>time for breakfast

<aggi>btw. fiwix is a nice kernel, it's just better if this wasn't cluttered, and usb/ioapic etc aren't trivial to implement and keeping such a kernel sane and simple

<lanodan>What do you have in tinycc-devutils.squashfs ? With https://hacktivis.me/git/bootstrap-initrd/ I get 48M uncompressed, 37MB gzip-9 compressed. And with disabling the extra tarballs, 9MB uncompressed, 2.9MB gzip-9, which I use for booting with FAT12 (somehow syslinux didn't like FAT32…).

<aggi>lanodan: almost everything that i could salvage, for support with tinycc toolchain

<aggi>since it's all statically linked, mplayer and ffmpeg accumulate 100MiB uncompressed each

<aggi>i'll just have to hack some initrd stuff for a two-stage rootfs transition during system boot, that's all

<aggi>and otherwise it's trivial to emit a minimal.iso flavor, to contain gdb,tinycc and a few other things needed

<lanodan>Ah makes sense, here only tcc+musl are compiled (and dynamic, simply because musl's libc.a is much bigger than libc.so).

<aggi>but i want to retain the complete package set variant too, and this complicates things a little because linux-2.4 can't handle an initrd.squashfs 700MiB in size

IRC channel logs

2024-12-07.log