Re: loading a compressed ramdisk image
Michael Schmitz wrote:
>
> > > That's the bootloader's job on PPC. With a sane OF implementation, your
> > > boot loader would be yaboot and something like initrd=<of-path to
> > > ramdisk> and append="root=/dev/ram" should do.
> > >
> > Is this functionality missing from the PPC or is it just convention to
> > let the bootloader handle this?
>
> Convention. You sure can compile in something to initialize the command
> line in the kernel but most people prefer to keep that in the bootstrap
> (which isn't as limited as on Intel in size).
>
> > My problem with having the bootloader do this is that we're writing our
> > own bootloader and I don't want to make it any more complex than it has
> > to be.
>
> Your call. You can hardcode the command line and ramdisk path in the
> loader as well. The loader needs to know where to find the ramdisk anyway,
> right? (The kernel cannot load the ramdisk from some other storage BTW.)
>
Do you mean that the kernel and root image need to live on the same
device? So if the kernel is on a floppy disk the root image can't be on
the hard disk.
Or it can be made to always pass root=/dev/ram as command line if
> all you'll ever do is use a ramdisk as root filesystem.
I'll definitely always use /dev/ram as the root device but I think I
need to have the root image be configurable.
Making a rdev
> equivalent for PPC cannot be that tough either, it just hasn't been done
> because no one thought it useful.
I've only read the man pages for rdev and I'm still not clear on how it
works. Does it mask a word in the kernel that has all of the
information on where to locate the root image? If that's all it does I
don't see why it wouldn't work for the PPC. Unless that word lives in a
different location on the PPC.
Thanks,
Andy
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