Description of problem: There are some limitations on power6 and power7 systems which prevents netbooting large initrd. The current PPC firmware supports downloading <32MB files. If the file is bigger, boot process fails (see the attached log for more information). Since there's about 130MB initrd in Fedora 15, netboot is not possible. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Features/UnifiedInitrd Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora 15 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start netboot installation of Fedora 15 on ppc. 2. watch if the ramdisk.image.gz is downloaded properly. 3. Actual results: ..... ( 1 ) Filename.................\tmp\ramdisk.image.gz TFTP Retries..................5 Block Size....................512 1 CKET COUNT = 65500 2 CKET COUNT = 65500 PACKET COUNT = 65500 Expected results: Ramdisk should be downloaded without problems. Additional info: The problem is probably also on Fedora 14, where the initrd is very close to 32MB in size. If the tftp limit is erased, there still may be a problem netbooting large images. From what I found out, booting more than 65MB initrd even from HDD with real-base=c00000 is not possible on power6 systems. It would be nice to know the limit on power7 systems.
ppc is not a primary architecture for Fedora anymore, so I don't really want to have the good progress we're making everywhere else held hostage to outdated tftp implementations.