Re: bootable, rootable, base, and the rest

[Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@ull.es>]

On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 10:01:58PM +0200, Sven Rudolph wrote:
[...] 
> Basically the difference is that you use a whole floppy disk for a
> root fs, but you don't want to allocate a whole ZIP or CD for this.
> 
> So we need a way to tell the kernel which part of the medium should be
> loaded.
> 
> Options:
> a) Load a file from a file system on that medium.
> b) Load a sequence of blocks from that medium.
> 
> Option b) was used on RedHat install floppies, it seems to be a
> not-so-well-known kernel feature. No idea whether it works on other
> media.
> 
> Option a) isn't implemented. Without kernel support we need a small
> initrd that mounts the medium, initialises the ramdisk from that
> medium and uses this ramdisk as root.
> 
> (A variant is to construct the filesystem in a way that the fs mounted
> from the medium can be readonly. Then you can simply loop-mount it
> into the already-existing fs.)

I would like to try the readonly-medium variant. That give us a lot of
room to include support for graphical installations, exotic targets (MD
rootfs, loop mounted fs, ...) and so on. It also plays nice with
different source media (CD-ROM, NFS mounted partition, SMB, or even
that HTTP-fs thingie I saw a few months ago... I wish I could remember
the URL...).

--
Enrique Zanardi					   ezanardi@ull.es