Hi there folks,

I'm looking for a tester or two to try out a kernel that may work
on some of the older brain-dead 3100's (and other models?) that
can't netboot kernels greater than about 900kB.

I've made a loader that is really just a small program with a gzip'd
kernel in it's data area and uses the zlib routines to decompress
it.  It's only "proof of concept" at the moment - there no program
to load a new kernel into the loader (ala mdsetimage for ramdisks).
Amazingly enough, the loader worked first time I tried it!

A loader with the nfsinstall kernel which is normally almost exactly
a megabyte is approx 440kB, and this could be about 25kB smaller
if I adjusted the size of the kernel buffer.

The loader with the nfsinstall kernel is on ftp.netbsd.org at
pub/NetBSD/arch/pmax/small-kernel/tiny.ecoff.gz .  If anyone with
a known problem machine could try to netboot this and report the
results I'd be grateful.


Simon.

[[ Please reply to either the list or simonb@netbsd.org.  My
   simonb@telstra.com.au address doesn't seem to healthy at
   the moment. ]]