Re: bootable, rootable, base, and the rest

[Eric Delaunay <delaunay@lix.polytechnique.fr>]

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.

Could it be used to install from a swap partition ?
(eg. installing debian/sparc from SunOS, using a disabled swap partition)

> 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.

BTW, silo (on sparc) is able to read ext2 fs, so it can be used to load a
ramdisk from any file ;-))

Regards.

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-- 
 Eric Delaunay                 | "La guerre justifie l'existence des militaires.
 delaunay@lix.polytechnique.fr | En les supprimant." Henri Jeanson (1900-1970)