Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 77759
cannot create boot diskette with updated smp kernel
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:48:23 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021003 Description of problem: After updating to kernel 2.4.18-17.8.0smp, and using a 1.4 M diskette, the command "mkbootdisk 2.4.18-17.8.0smp" fails with the error message: gzip: stdout: No space left on device cat: write error: No space left on device cat: write error: No space left on device Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): mkbootdisk-1.4.8-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Fully update i686 smp system. 2. mkbootdisk 2.4.18-17.8.0smp 3. pout. Actual Results: Process fails with error message: gzip: stdout: No space left on device cat: write error: No space left on device cat: write error: No space left on device Expected Results: The process should happily create a bootable diskette with no complaints. Additional info: I just tried, and the "stock" smp kernel (2.4.18-14smp, from the 8.0 CD) also fails, but with only one "cat" line instead of two... This means I don't have a boot diskette any more. :-( :-( Looks like we'll need some way of tagging or identifying essential modules for inclusion on the boot diskette. Another possible option is to ship an image with each kernel (?).
Sorry I didn't call mkbootdisk with the -v flag before... here it is: [root@helium root]# mkbootdisk -v 2.4.18-17.8.0smp Insert a disk in /dev/fd0. Any information on the disk will be lost. Press <Enter> to continue or ^C to abort: Formatting /dev/fd0... done. Copying /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-17.8.0smp... done. Creating initrd image... gzip: stdout: No space left on device done. Configuring bootloader... cat: write error: No space left on device cat: write error: No space left on device done. And here is what the diskette ends up looking like: [root@helium test]# mdir a: Volume in drive A has no label Volume Serial Number is 3DD1-C87A Directory for A:/ LDLINUX SYS 7112 11-12-2002 22:35 VMLINUZ 1203101 10-08-2002 12:06 vmlinuz INITRD IMG 253952 11-12-2002 22:36 initrd.img SYSLINUX CFG 0 11-12-2002 22:36 syslinux.cfg BOOT MSG 0 11-12-2002 22:36 boot.msg 5 files 1 464 165 bytes 0 bytes free
There are some improvements to help with this in mkbootdisk-1.5.0-1, but we're quickly reaching the size limit for floppies. There's now a --iso flag to mkbootdisk that will allow you to create a bootable ISO image to use (which doesn't have these size restrictions) as well.