Re: Hurd advocacy? Bootable (Knoppix-like) CD?
Philip Charles <philipc@copyleft.co.nz> writes:
> For a GNU live CD to work a hurdish ramdisk would have to be created and
> setup at the initial boot.
I think that's what the gzip store type is for; it's a store that is
initialized by unpacking gzipped data in an underlying store. It
should be possible to use it with the plain ext2 translator, although
it might be inefficient compared to a specialized ramdisk fs. Hmm, we
probably don't even need the gzip store, as GRUB can inflate the image
for us.
I'm a little confused about the Hurd boot procedure in general, but I
guess it should work like this:
GRUB loads the kernel, the ext2 root translator, any other servers
(proc? ld.so?) which are needed for boot, and the gzipped ext2-image
(which must contain enough free blocks so that new files can be
written to it).
The kernel wraps the loaded filesystem image into a memory object.
Then the ext2 server must be started with arguments that tells it to
use a supplied memory image as the underlying store.
When the root filesystem is running, control is passed on to some boot
script (/etc/runsystem?), which can install whatever additional
symlinks and translators that aren't present already in the filesystem
image, and start the rest of the system.
I'm not sure what the missing pieces (if any?) are. The memory object
store type? The passing of the memory object between kernel and the
root ext2 server? The creation of a memory object from a grub module?
Another issue is that as we have no writable disks, the system must be
reasonably stable without swap, or one has to fake some swap by by
somwhow putting a swap file inside the ramdisk (ugly and wastes some
more memory).
Regards,
/Niels
Reply to: