Re: Bootable (Knoppix-like) CD -- ramdisks
On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 04:42:34AM +0100, 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.
We already have tmpfs which runs on raw memory and doesn't need any
filesystem. But tmpfs is buggy. You can also always use a store made up
from fresh memory, but that store would then need to be initialized with a
filesystem (I think you use "-T copy zero:16M" for a 16MB RAM store, or so).
A more Hurdish approach would be to have a unionfs translator laid on top of
a regular read only filesystem. There are prototypes of such unionfs
filesystems implemented, but more work would be required. Maybe for version 2?
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/
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