Re: mipsel install failure in gxemul-ated decstation
On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 05:07:38AM -0700, Michel Lespinasse wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 11:36:51AM +0100, Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> > Michel Lespinasse wrote:
> > > In other words, it was all my fault. Now I'm trying to figure out how to
> > > convince gxemul to start a debian kernel with the debian initrd...
> >
> > I wonder why this is a problem, the DECstation installer images already
> > contain the initrd. If gxemul is good enough at emulating a DECstation
> > harddisk/cdrom you can boot from the mini.iso installer image. If the
> > emulator supports netboot, then the boot.img should work.
> >
> > The separate kernel and initrd binaries are only needed to build bigger
> > CD images. The delo package contains the 'delo' and 't-rex' commands
> > to create bootable images.
>
> What happens is that t-rex builds an ecoff image, I suppose this is what
> the firmware on a real decstation would boot. However gxemul does not have
> any firmware, it only knows how to load an ELF file and get it started.
> Well supposedly it should also be able to load a binary file such as the
> initrd image, but for some reason I've been unable to figure out the glue
> to make that work. So what I need is the debian kernel + initrd image
> in a single ELF file.
>
> The way to go apparently is to build a kernel with the mips config option
> CONFIG_EMBEDDED_RAMDISK so that the initrd image is embedded with the
> kernel image. I'll try that tomorrow and see what happens. Incidently
> this is also how I got confused as I did not know my kernel image had
> such an embedded initrd image (with the sarge installer... grumpf :)
Please have a look at the powerpc mkvmlinuz package, which was done to do
exactly this, and could be extended or copied for your particular case.
Basically, it puts all the arch/powerpc/boot stuff into the package, and then
does the post-installation linking of the vmlinux+initrd into a zImage with
builtin ramdisk.
I heard from Maks that mips/mipsel just recently had support for working
initramfs (at least with regard to initramfs-tools), and the d-i images are
still cramfs right now.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Reply to: