>>>>> Tibor Polgar writes: >> >> On Wed, 2003-02-19 at 22:05, Krishnakumar. R wrote: >> >> > Hi, >> >> > >> >> > Is there any way that I can keep >> >> > a ramdisk image (containing the root filesystem) >> >> > in a flash device and boot to it. >> >> >> >> Yes, and other architectures have support for passing arguments to the >> >> kernel that tell it where the ramdisk is. I don't know that we've done >> >> that for MIPS, yet. It wouldn't be too hard to do and maybe someone on >> >> this list is already working on it (I think someone actually is working >> >> on it and was preparing a patch for Ralf). >> >> > For having separate initrd and kernel load we also need an aware bootloader >> > that knows where to find the ramdisk. RedBoot, from what i read, seems to be >> > i386 specific. >> >> Not at all. RedBoot can be used to pass a command line to MIPS kernels. It >> would be simple to add the passing of a ramdisk address. It already supports >> ramdisks from ARM and SH kernels. > The original poster wanted a setup where the initrd was NOT part of the > kernel, which begs the question of how/where it would be put into flash so > something could load/uncompress it. I'd love to have a way to decouple the > two so i wouldn't have to recompile the kernel when i change the root image, > but still not waste any space in flash. I guess they could be written one > after the other and the loader is just given a "load map" of where each one > resides. Would this satisfy Krishnakumar's requirements? The ARM kernel separates the two and RedBoot handles that. There are a number of approaches. Typically, RedBoot is used to store the separate images in flash. You can then have a script that loads them into memory and starts the kernel. You could have a script grab the two images off of a tftp server. etc. --Mark
