Re: G5 powermacs

[Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

> When I was working on incorporating G5 support ( patches from someone
> else, I just helped getting them into the tree ) this was what I got:
>
> - kernels had to be loaded directly, without ofwboot.xcf, at least for
>   netbooting. There's a size limit imposed by OF which seems to be
>   about 4MB, bigger kernels will randomly crash or not load at all
>   IIRC. G5s don't have BARs, I'm not sure ofwboot knows that.

Then the kernel needs to go on a real diet.  In -current the
default POWERMAC_G5 kernel config results in a 6.1MB kernel file,
with sizes such as this:

mt: {57} size /u/build/HEAD/obj/macppc/sys/arch/macppc/compile/POWERMAC_G5/netbsd
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
3366639 2350212  125796 5842647  5926d7 /u/build/HEAD/obj/macppc/sys/arch/macppc/compile/POWERMAC_G5/netbsd
mt: {58} 

Even if we just add text+data, we get to 5.7MB.  And the INSTALL
kernel has an 2.5MB embedded ramdisk as well, so making a G5
INSTALL kernel is going to be quite the challenge, since it needs
to be uncompressed.  Hmm...  Doesn't i386/amd64 use an iso9660
root file system in the cd-rom install images?  It looks like
MODULAR is enabled in GENERIC, perhaps that technique can be used
to slim the initial load size of the kernel.  I'll see if I can
look into that.

Regards,

- Håvard