loop-root (was What's Debian's /usr/src policy)
[You (Dale Scheetz)]
>On Wed, 7 Jan 1998, Turbo Fredriksson wrote:
>> A loop-root?
>With a small patch to the kernel and some modification of the loop device
>code, you can create a file-system-in-a-file.
You can do this already in stock debian (rex and hamm) with
mount -o loop -t <fs> <file> <mount point>
Why do you need to patch the kernel for this?
>Using the loop device
>the internal file system can be mounted as the root file system for the
>kernel. These patches were never adopted by the kernel, and it is getting
>harder and harder to apply them, so I currently use a patched 2.0.27
>kernel to boot that system.
Why do you have to patch the kernel at all? I already have this
funcationality w/ initrd. Again, this is on an upatched 2.0.30 and 2.0.32
kernels.
BTW, I use it on my custom-rolled boot floppies for debian booting off a
floppy for a laptop which runs an initrd w/ cardmgr on it so I could get
PCMCIA subsystem up and play with NFS-mounting root. I have a little make
file which makes a pretty complete but small initrd file system (using
mount -o loop) complete w/ shared libs etc, even ash. It all works, at
least to the extent that NFS-root works well at all (which is not much but
I haven't gotten around to pestering Joost about it).
Alternatively you could use the ramdisk and just mount root in the same
basic fashion (although initrd is a little different -- not much really).
>The one I boot with lilo is on an ext2 partition (another beauty of the
>imbeded file system, it can be coppied to almost any other file system).
>Interesting point: on an ext2 file system, no care need be taken. On a DOS
>file system the file system must be un-fragmented (using dfrag) before the
>DiD installation will work properly. The funny part of this is that it
>doesn't matter whether you do the dfrag before you copy the file system,
>or afterwards, it still works. Without it you get file system errors.
Never noticed this issue on my 'mount -o loop' and initrd scheme. Using
SYSLINUX to boot I think.
.....A. P. Harris...apharris@onShore.com...<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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