Olaf Hering wrote:
On Wed, Sep 15, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
One more thing that worth nothing: I have been warned that there are
some platforms with some pretty egregorious limits on the boot image
size. Thus, there needs to be a solution for the people who simply
cannot add a large amount to the kernel image size.
Can these archs load a vmlinux + initrd combo?
Generally no.
I see no need to put the initramfs.gz into the vmlinkx binary.
It's not only place there is on some of these boxes. At some point
perhaps they need a second-stage loader, but that's a project all on its
own.
On old pmac as example: when booted via openfirmware (using the coff
format) there is only 4MB free space for the uncompressed vmlinux
binary, then a gap for the firmware, and another one for the loaded boot
image. The ramdisk is moved from the boot image to some other fixed
location. If the cpio archive is part of the vmlinux, the 4MB limit is
exceeded very soon (depends on the .config).
Since klibc binaries are very small, it should not be an issue.
-hpa
