Re: mipsel install failure in gxemul-ated decstation
On Wednesday 30 August 2006 13:15, Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> Michel Lespinasse wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > 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.
>
> Maybe you can convert the initrd into a cpio archive and append it at
> the kernel image. I heard this is supposed to work, I haven't tried it
> myself.
It works, BUT you must build this as part of the kernel build (in recent
kernels only). If you try to append it later then, due to what I think
is a bug in objcopy, it fails.
I have used this to good effect to netboot (a bit like PXE boot) Microtik
RB-532 boards (which are mips based).
David
>
> > 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 :)
>
> CONFIG_EMBEDDED_RAMDISK is obsolete and was removed a while ago from
> upstream kernels.
>
>
> Thiemo
Reply to: