On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 11:37:30PM +0100, Wookey wrote:
+++ Dave Martin [2011-06-01 15:56 +0100]:
Separate question how big is Debian-installer, in terms of filesystem and RAM footprint?
There are various flavours. Primarily:
a 'full' image which is 160MB and includes the base system that is installed (so you can get a system without network access),
a minimal image which is 33MB and needs a network to download the
packages to be installed.
- initrd-based headless installers for various arm boxes which vary
from 4.5 to 18Mb (including kernel) e.g: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-armel/current/image...
The D-I system is very flexible. But it does depend on the building of udebs (minimal versions of debs which are used to make installed bootable images). You could make a rather fatter installer out of normal debs, but that would preclude the initrd flavour.
I don't know how much ram is needed, but it works on the 32Mb NSLU2 so 'not much', at least in headless form. More for the GUI version.
If we can move the entire installation system to a ramfs on boot, we can unmount and free up the boot device, allowing the system to be installed in-place.
This is possible. On most of the currently-supported-by-debian arm devices a console and some uboot runes are required to get things installed and defaulting to booting off the desired device. Some (such as thecus n2100) support a web+ssh install: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/iop/n2100/install.html
Things are somewhat simplified if we are only worrying about devices which already boot from USB or SD/MMC.
This might also require Linux's idea of which devices are "removable" to be overridden though, so that they can be repartitioned without a reboot. I think the kernel hard-codes this for some of our boards currently; i.e., the boot SD slot may be considered non- removable. I don't know how easy it is do get around this.
This is only a problem if repartitioning is needed.
Partitioning is normally at least desirable during install, no?
---Dave