[ale] custom boot disk woes

[Kevin Krumwiede]

I'm just messin' around with an old P75 I found in the trash.  Right now all it has is a floppy drive and a couple EtherExpress/10s... and wow, it's QUIET.  I'm hoping to make it into a firewall.

I built a 2.4 kernel and wrote it to a floppy.  It boots OK and of course hangs when it can't find init.

I then made a root filesystem containing only /sbin/init and /dev/tty0 and added it to the floppy.  The kernel finds and loads the compressed disk image, but then I get this message:

Warning: unable to open an initial console

I don't know if my init is running.  This might be pretty naive, but here's what I'm using for /sbin/init (compiled with -static):

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, void* argv[]) {
	puts("init executed successfully");
	while(1) { }
}

I'm not seeing that message.  I'm assuming that's because there's no console.

BTW, I originally tried using a 2.2 kernel to save space, but I can't get it to boot at all.  It oopses right away with a null pointer exception.  I Googled for that error, and the results seemed to suggest a bad memory chip or something.  But 2.4 boots fine and MS-DOS was working on the machine when I got it, so I don't think that's the problem.  This happens with a fresh bzImage, before I mess with the ramdisk word or anything.  Ideas?

Thanks,
Krum
_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale