Opteron, Grub, initrd, and "Image Too Large"

[troyt]

Having installed Gentoo before (several times on 32-bit), I got though most of the setup fine.

Then came Grub, normally my bootloader of choice.

I generated the kernel using the 'genkernel' script (with --menuconfig --gensplash --udev, my own config, etc).

Then I set up grub as specified in the documentation. I noted it's identical to how it would work on a 32-bit system; no suprise.

However, when I try to boot, I get an "Image Too Large" error . This is with respect to the initrd file (or at least, I believe it is).

I can get it to boot the kernel if I remove the initrd line (and modify the kernel line to match, of course). However, since the disk controller modules are in the initrd (not compiled into the kernel), the kernel panics when it gets to the point it would try to mount a disk.

I know that I could just compile the drivers into the kernel; but let's assume that I cannot follow this path for various reasons... Among them is binary distribution of built packages (no, it's not a rarely used feature of portage).

I've also tried the latest grub (0.96) cvs, with similar results.

Any hints?

Troy
Telford

[inode77]

[dnix]

I got the same problem... and the size of my kernel is... 6Mb!!! the initrd is normal, about 1Mb... I'm investigating

[troyt]

Apparently, you add to the kernel line:

mem=<size>

So, if you have 1GB of system memory, you would have:

kernel (hd0,1)/vmlinuz <blah blah blah> mem=1G
initrd (hd0,1)/initrd

[dnix]

If you compile your kernel without genkernel but in the old way you got a nice clean image .
Don't forget to do make mrproper before.
Denix