On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 12:01:49PM -0800, Tibor Polgar wrote: > > >> 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? > For the sanity of kernel, I also favor leaving ramfs root outside kernel. It would be nice if we can do the following : 1) create kernel ELF as normal 2) outside the kernel, create .o file that is ramfs root 3) outside the kernel, we use a separate tool/program that combines 1) and 2) into a new ELF file. The entry point of the new ELF file would append ramfs parameters (such as "initrd=xxxx") to the args and then jump to kernel_entry. There are some difficulties, but looks very possible. Jun
