Re: initramfs size limitation

["Bryan Wu" <cooloney@kernel.org>]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 8:25 AM, Mike Frysinger <vapier.adi@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Rob Landley wrote:
>> On Saturday 31 May 2008 07:44:14 Phil Wilshire wrote:
>>> I hope this is the right place and the right sort of question.
>>>
>>> I work closely with the Blackfin systems and they have now integrated
>>> the initramfs generation into their system build. The result is great
>>> the root fs is ready to run from the page cache.
>>
>> Is it possible to get blackfin working with a vanilla gcc release yet, or do
>> you still need out-of-tree patches?  (I have a blackfin board I got at OLS,
>> but it needs a toolchain I can't reproduce.)
>
> there's plenty of usable binaries available
>
>> fact it would be really nice if qemu grew blackfin support because messing
>
> i imagine it would be ... too bad qemu lacks real documentation
>
>>> There is one problem that I can see that may be more serious for
>>> embedded users.
>>> As far as I can tell the initramfs filesystem is not restricted in size.
>>> You can keep writing files until it uses all available memory.
>>
>> Yup.  There have intermittently been patches to make rootfs be tmpfs instead
>> of ramfs, the most recent of which I remember was:
>> http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/7/13/354
>
> it wouldnt matter.  tmpfs on NOMMU doesnt support any of the options
> like MMU.  look at mm/tiny-shmem.c and init/Kconfig.
> -mike
> --

Right, I still got one bug related to tmpfs/ramfs on NOMMU. That is
the fcntl/cease problem.
Some LTP testcases still fail because of this.

-Bryan