Re: Atari TT

[Finn Thain <fthain@telegraphics.com.au>]

On Mon, 9 Jan 2012, schmitz wrote:

> Finn,
> > I booted Linux 3.1-rc5 with a BusyBox initramfs on a 4 MB PowerBook 
> > recently. I had to create minimal configs for both, but it did indeed 
> > boot to a shell prompt.
> >   
> Can you provide that ramdisk for this sort of tests? Over on linux-m68k, 
> Alan has got past the framebuffer problem now, but his initrd fails to 
> run some udev related binary. If yours does work without udev it might 
> help him debug things further.

I no longer have that initramfs directory but I can run a script to 
regenerate it if need be. I do have a similar ext2 ramdisk though. It has 
minicom but no networking tools or kernel modules -- 
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/~fthain/schmitz/initrd.ext2.gz

> > The kernel (with initramfs) was loaded by Pengiun within the free RAM 
> > availble under System 7 so I imagine this scenario isn't much 
> > different to the TOS/GEM scenario but I have no experience with Atari 
> > hardware. YMMV.
> >   
> The ramdisk does not have to fit into the 4MB in the TT case, there's 
> enough memory (just not of the 24bit addressable kind).

OK. I guess you realise that a kernel binary incorporating an initramfs is 
cheaper and leaner than a kernel binary plus ramdisk image. (The initramfs 
doesn't get decompressed by the bootloader but gets decompressed later by 
the kernel when more memory is available. And because it gets unpacked 
into the buffer cache, the overhead of ext2 filesystem structure is 
avoided.)

Finn

> 
> Cheers,
> 
>  Michael
> 
> 
> 
>