Re: [RFC][Patch] Allow not mounting a root fs

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On Saturday 07 July 2007 5:17:31 pm H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> > On Jul 7 2007 13:56, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> >> Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> >>> On Jul 5 2007 19:08, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> >>>>> BTW: Is it possible to mount a tmpfs on / before extracting the cpio?
> >>>>
> >>>> Not in the stock kernel.  There have been some patches floating around
> >>>> for that, I think.
> >>>
> >>> What would it buy? rootfs is a tmpfs, is not it?
> >>
> >> No, rootfs is ramfs.
> >
> > Thanks for clarifying. Well, why is it a ramfs, and not tmpfs?
> > (I think I know the difference, but the question stands.
> > A system without any swap somewhat equals a ramfs, or?)
>
> It gets initialized very early, and a lot of the setup needed for tmpfs
> to work isn't ready yet.

Out of curiosity, do you know which setup?  I know that it won't actually swap 
anything out yet because no swap is mounted, but I thought that mounting 
tmpfs and doing a swapon afterwards was ok...

> 	-hpa

Rob
-- 
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
  - Ken Thompson.