Re: Bootable (Knoppix-like) CD -- ramdisks
On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Greg Buchholz wrote:
>
> On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Philip Charles wrote:
> > For a GNU live CD to work a hurdish ramdisk would have to be created and
> > setup at the initial boot. If this could be done we could also use this
> > to create a native GNU installer. At the moment the CDs have to use a
> > Linux ramdisk and then reboot into GNU once the HDD has been setup. I can
> > think of no way of rebooting into a ramdisk.
>
> Can this ramdisk be a regular hurd translator? Or does it have to
> be a special beast because the full system isn't up and running? I'm
> guessing it must be the hard one (anyone care to venture a guess?),
> because it seems like a ram disk would be one of the easier translators to
> make. I'm sure this has probably been discussed before, so I'll google
> around to see what I can come up with.
The process would go something like this.
GNU boots. A ramdisk is created and a filesystem copied into it. The
ramdisk / is mounted as root. Control of the system is passed to whatever
in the ramdisk. Hardware is detected. Symlinks to the cdrom created.
More hardware detected and configurations stored in /etc.
I have not tried to do this, but creating a floppy to boot GNU should be
possible. If this can be done with a floppy it can be done with a CD.
The tricky part would be creating the ramdisk and copying the filesystem
into it as part of the initial boot process.
Can translators be stored on an iso filesystem? If not we are probably
fscked from the start.
Phil.
--
Philip Charles; 39a Paterson Street, Abbotsford, Dunedin, New Zealand
+64 3 488 2818 Fax +64 3 488 2875 Mobile 025 267 9420
philipc@copyleft.co.nz - preferred. philipc@debian.org
I sell GNU/Linux & GNU/Hurd CDs. See http://www.copyleft.co.nz
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