On Mon, 15 Apr 2002, Guido Guenther wrote: > > Hmm, isn't that broken? I believe an initial RAM disk should be added to > > an ELF image, before converting it to ECOFF. Not everyone uses ECOFF and > > ELF is the "canonical" executable format for Linux. Everything else is a > > derivative. > But we currently don't support relinking the ELF kernel to add a ramdisk, I don't know. We are going to have to if the BOOTP/NFS-root code gets removed, which will supposedly happen quite soon. > do we [1]? Elf2ecoff/addinitrd is the only way I know of to achieve this > and I still don't understand why the recent init_task.c/head.S changes > where necessary which broke this. Maybe because that's an ugly hack (as I can see from your description). > [1] I know that one can link a ramdisk into the ELF image but this > ramdisk hat to be available at kernel compile time which is not an option in > many situations(e.g. Debian "boot-floppies"). It depends on how a kernel gets built. If we add "-r" to the current final link we'll get "vmlinux.o" that is a complete, self-contained kernel, that may be linked against a RAM-disk (or just relinked alone) without a problem. That's actually a generic solution and certainly something like this will likely have to get implemented as soon as a RAM-disk gets mandatory for block-device-less ;-) configurations. Maciej -- + Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland + +--------------------------------------------------------------+ + e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available +
