Swap Brainstorm (was Re: [Rule-list] Test of 0.6.3-small - the whole story)

[Martin Stricker]

Scott Hallock wrote:

> I've been pondering the problem of having to do so much initial work
> without swap for, well, a few years now.  It seems like we would
> have much better luck installing in extremely low memory situations
> if we could find and activate some swap very early in the boot
> process.
>
> Suppose a user could arrange for MBR partition 0 of the first BIOS
> drive to be set up as a reasonably-sized partition with a Linux swap
> partition identifier before attempting to boot the installer.[1] 
> Would it be possible to modifiy the installer init scripts to run a
> program or programs that identify this situation, and immediately run
> mkswap and swapon on the pre-made swap partition?  Would doing so help
> the install process at all, or is the size of the initrd what's
> killing us?

I, too, have been thinking about this, but I'm not knowledgeable enough
to do it. One thought, though: When does the kernel during the normal
boot (that one that gets installed) mkswap/swapon? Maybe this method can
be used just before starting the installer?

> [1] Ideally, you would use a FreeDOS boot floppy and FreeDOS fdisk to
> accomplish this, but FreeDOS isn't quite ready for this task, yet
> (it doesn't like booting from floppy if you have a hard drive with
> a partition table it considers invalid attached to the machine, for
> one thing).  For the time being, you'd be stuck using an MS-DOS or
> DR-DOS boot floppy with some third-party, DOS-based partitioning tool.

Why using DOS if you can use Linux? There are several floppy Linux
distros available, like:
Trinux http://www.trinux.org/
fli4l http://www.fli4l.de/
µLinux http://sunsite.auc.dk/
Pocket Linux http://www.pocket-lnx.org/index.html.en
I suggest looking deeper into µLinux because it can be installed easily
on the hard disk, too. So µLinux obviously can handle the fdisk part.

Best regards,
Martin Stricker
-- 
Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/
Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/

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