SliTaz Forum

relic_tinkerer

Membre

Inscrit(e): 2011-10-17

Messages: 6

Trying to create a custom kernel for Tiny Slitaz

Similar to another user in another topic, I too am trying to get Slitaz working on an OLD laptop (specifically, it's a Sharp PC-3040) with 24MB RAM and a 100MHz Pentium processor. As a curiosity, I'm wondering whether I can make it work as a comamnd-line MPD server.

Anyway, pretty much any of the standard installation options seem to be out. Floppy is my only real boot option with it, and I wasn't able to get it to start successfully with the loram base floppy set, nor did floppy-grub4dos work (I was getting a BIOS error with that; I think it was trying to make a memory call that my hardware didn't support).

So I decided to give booting with Tiny Slitaz a try (thinking that I could try the manual install). It did indeed boot, but it couldn't recognize my hard drive. Figuring I might need a custom kernel that included support for my laptop's drive controller (Intel MPIIX) among other things, I set Slitaz up on a virtual machine on my desktop, and started going through the steps to build a custom kernel.

Once I went through menuconfig to my satisfaction, I built it, and tried to load the resulting bzImage (1.1MB) as my custom kernel at tiny.slitaz.org. But when I got to the download screen, the floppy image and the kernel download were both empty (zero-length files). Is there anything obvious that I'm doing wrong here? Is there anything specific that tiny.slitaz.org is looking for in a custom kernel that I may have neglected? If those questions seem a little broad, is there any place I might be able to find the .config files for the "official" Tiny kernels to use for comparison, to get an idea of where I might be going wrong?

If I need to supply more information (entirely likely), please let me know.

Thanks!

bellard

Administrator

Inscrit(e): 2011-03-28

Messages: 657

Re: Trying to create a custom kernel for Tiny Slitaz

My fault. http://tiny.slitaz.org/ should be fixed now. Can you try again ?

Note that the rootfs of the base flavor and a custom (lite) kernel should boot in 24Mb.

You can build boot floppies with http://mirror.slitaz.org/floppies/builder/index.php

It will be easier to get SliTaz packages than Tiny SliTaz packages (uclibc based).

(the first 7 floppies of http://mirror.slitaz.org/floppies/index-loram-3.0.html should boot in 24Mb too)

BTW, what was the BIOS error with grub4dos ?

relic_tinkerer

Membre

Inscrit(e): 2011-10-17

Messages: 6

Re: Trying to create a custom kernel for Tiny Slitaz

First off, thank you! I am now able to get a custom kernel loaded into the Tiny Slitaz builder. I'll need to play with it somewhat though, as when I try to load it, I'm getting the same issue that I get with the normal loram base build.

On that topic, when I use the base-loram floppy set (3.0 stable), it will get to disk 5, at which point it starts decompressing linux, and gets to:

Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs

This results in a stack dump with several rootfs-related calls; the last two entries I see are:

do_one_initcall

kernel_thread_helper

As I mentioned, this happens with both the base-loram set, and my custom kernel. It seems I'm including something that my laptop isn't prepared to deal with, but I'm not sure what. The official Tiny kernels, on the other hand, DO boot, so they must strip out more than I have. I'd be interested to know what. Is there an easy way to determine the configuration under which a bzImage kernel file was built?

As for loading floppy_grub4dos, it displays "Get E801 memory..." and then hangs.

Thanks again!