User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; pt-PT; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7 Build Identifier: I've a i586 computer in which I tried to boot the Universal Install CD and the Minimal Install CD. But they don't boot - I get a "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!" message. A copy of the text displayed while booting the 2005.1 Universal Install CD follows as an attachment. As I'm not able to boot the install CD on this computer, I've installed Gentoo from DSL and using NFS shares on my other computer (i686). It's now up and running, but the CD stills not booting My computer characteristics: Intel Pentium 75-200 166.232Mhz 256k cache (/proc/cpuinfo flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8) 32 MBs of RAM Western Digital hard disk drive (1GB): WDC AC21000H, ATA DISK drive CD-ROM drive: CD-ROM Drive/F5A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive ATAPI 48X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache PCI devices (lspci): 0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 430FX - 82437FX TSC [Triton I] (rev 02) 0000:00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82371FB PIIX ISA [Triton I] (rev 02) 0000:00:08.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 215CT [Mach64 CT] (rev 09) 0000:00:11.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6105 [Rhine-III] (rev 8b) ISA Devices: Sound card (supported by kernel module snd-cs4232) Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Insert the CD on the drive 2. Boot SmartBootManager from floppy 3. Choose Boot from CD-ROM 4. Press enter at the "boot:" prompt 5. Wait some seconds 6. A "Kernel panic" appears Actual Results: I've installed the system using NFS shares and Damn Small Linux. Expected Results: I should have been able to install the system from Gentoo CD-ROM.
Created attachment 76827 [details] The contents of the screen when the "Kernel panic" message has been shown. Here is the full error message.
Minimum system requirements are 64 Megabytes of RAM...
(In reply to comment #2) > Minimum system requirements are 64 Megabytes of RAM... > The computer is now running Gentoo only with 32 Megabytes, and as far as I know, the minimum memory needed to run the Linux kernel is only 4 Megabytes. Does the CD-ROM kernel needs more memory than the ``normal
(In reply to comment #2) > Minimum system requirements are 64 Megabytes of RAM... > The computer is now running Gentoo only with 32 Megabytes, and as far as I know, the minimum memory needed to run the Linux kernel is only 4 Megabytes. Does the CD-ROM kernel needs more memory than the ``normal´´ kernel?
Yes. The kernel on the CD has most modules setup, and many modules get loaded, waiting for a device to appear to attach to. This was a change somewhere in the 2.6 kernel branch. Previously, modules would not load if the device was not present that it represented. With later kernels, the module loads and waits for the device to show up, triggering a hotplug event. Also, even if you managed to get past the kernel panic, the squashfs filesystem used takes up a significant amount of space. Considering that the kernel plus the initramfs take up more than 16MB of space *before* loading any drivers or the squashfs, you can easily see how quickly memory is consumed.
Now I undestand what happened. But isn't it possible to create a live-cd kernel which is able to boot in systems with less than 64MBs of RAM? If Gentoo can be installed and used in these systems, the install CD should boot on them too.
No. The only way to facilitate that would be via a custom CD. If you knew the hardware that you were targetting, and didn't need to include drivers for other hardware, it could be done. There's no way that we could make one that still has the same functionality. I have been experimenting with a uclibc-based CD, which would reduce the memory requirements due to a smaller footprint, but it is nowhere near completion. Even then, I'm still not sure that it would work on a machine with 32MB of RAM.
(In reply to comment #6) > The only way to facilitate that would be via a custom CD. If you knew the > hardware that you were targetting, and didn't need to include drivers for other > hardware, it could be done. There's no way that we could make one that still > has the same functionality. Isn't it possible to include a kernel image from DSL in the Gentoo CD-ROM? (I'm able to boot DSL on the ``problematic'' machine.)
No. That would reduce our functionality greatly, as it does not include nearly as many drivers as we do. The simple answer is we have no desire to attempt to support such lowmem machines, due to the added hassle in trying to get them to work. We have a published minimum system requirements that plainly states that we do not support anything less than 64MB of RAM.
