Swap Brainstorm (was Re: [Rule-list] Test of 0.6.3-small - the whole story)

[Scott Hallock]

[most of the message from Devon has been elided, I just left a couple
of relavant quotes.]
> All normal (the delays) when you have stretched the memory limits of the 
> installer. The message above is the amount of swap  that the 
> autopartition utility would suggest, and is also normal.
.
.
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> 
> Yes, once we can get swap turned on, things go pretty well.

I've been pondering the problem of having to do so much initial work
without swap for, well, a few years now.  It seems like we would
have much better luck installing in extremely low memory situations
if we could find and activate some swap very early in the boot
process.

Suppose a user could arrange for MBR partition 0 of the first BIOS drive
to be set up as a reasonably-sized partition with a Linux swap partition 
identifier before attempting to boot the installer.[1]  Would it be 
possible to modifiy the installer init scripts to run a program or programs 
that identify this situation, and immediately run mkswap and swapon on the 
pre-made swap partition?  Would doing so help the install process at all, 
or is the size of the initrd what's killing us?

Forgive me if these questions sound stupid.  I know next to nothing
about how Red Hat installs itself these days.  Writing the program
to identify a pre-made swap partition is probably not beyond my
abilities, but I have no idea if I could insert it into the Red Hat
installation process.

Which reminds me, are there any good docs available on the internal
workings of the Red Hat installer and installation boot disks?

Scott

[1] Ideally, you would use a FreeDOS boot floppy and FreeDOS fdisk to
accomplish this, but FreeDOS isn't quite ready for this task, yet
(it doesn't like booting from floppy if you have a hard drive with
a partition table it considers invalid attached to the machine, for 
one thing).  For the time being, you'd be stuck using an MS-DOS or 
DR-DOS boot floppy with some third-party, DOS-based partitioning tool.