Re: Ramdisk image on flash.

[Tibor Polgar <tpolgar@freehandsystems.com>]

> >> On Wed, 2003-02-19 at 22:05, Krishnakumar. R wrote:
> >> > Hi,
> >> >
> >> > Is there any way that I can keep
> >> > a ramdisk image (containing the root filesystem)
> >> > in a flash device and boot to it.
> >>
> >> Yes, and other architectures have support for passing arguments to the
> >> kernel that tell it where the ramdisk is. I don't know that we've done
> >> that for MIPS, yet.  It wouldn't be too hard to do and maybe someone on
> >> this list is already working on it (I think someone actually is working
> >> on it and was preparing a patch for Ralf).
> 
> > For having separate initrd and kernel load we also need an aware bootloader
> > that knows where to find the ramdisk.   RedBoot, from what i read, seems to be
> > i386 specific.
> 
> Not at all. RedBoot can be used to pass a command line to MIPS kernels. It
> would be simple to add the passing of a ramdisk address. It already supports
> ramdisks from ARM and SH kernels.

The original poster wanted a setup where the initrd was NOT part of the
kernel, which begs the question of how/where it would be put into flash so
something could load/uncompress it.   I'd love to have a way to decouple the
two so i wouldn't have to recompile the kernel when i change the root image,
but still not waste any space in flash.   I guess they could be written one
after the other and the loader is just given a "load map" of where each one
resides.   Would this satisfy Krishnakumar's requirements?

Tibor