Re: Booter for 9.3 kernel not working

On Thu, 25 Jan 2024 23:09:14 -0500, Matthew Stock wrote:
> First, I was getting an lseek issue with the native filesystem image
> boot.  I realized that it would boot, but only if the kernel was
> compressed.  I believe this was in some way due to the file size, but
> I haven't confirmed that yet.

This faintly rings a bell - ISTR there are size limits...

> So why wouldn't it work on the BSD filesystem?  The standard kernel
> isn't compressed, so that isn't it.  The Booter logs indicate that it
> was able to parse the filesystem, find the file, but that the magic
> number was all 0's vs the standard ELF.  In this case, I think the
> problem is that for the default kernel, the inode number and/or the
> blocks used to store the kernel are small.  When I built a new kernel,
> the blocks being used on the filesystem (which is fairly large) may
> have been beyond some power of 2, and the filesystem handling code
> couldn't find the executable and read it properly.

... and since we are talking about size -- how big is your root 
filesystem, and how far away from block 0 is it? ISTR (using that 
acronym an awful lot, but I've been with NetBSD/mac68k since 1994) 
there were issues with 6 byte vs. 10 byte SCSI block addresses, and you 
want to make sure the booter can find what it's looking for in the 
first GByte of disk.

Cheerio,
Hauke

-- 
Hauke Fath                        <[email protected]>
Linnéweg 7
64342 Seeheim-Jugenheim
Germany