Re: Q: Linux rebooting directly into linux.

Eric W. Biederman
2000-11-16T07:58:46Z

Erik Andersen <andersen@codepoet.org> writes:

> On Tue Nov 14, 2000 at 07:59:18AM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> >
> > All mkelfImage does is the pasting of initrd's, command lines,
> > and just a touch of argument conversion code.
>
> You can link in an initrd using linker magic, i.e.
> $(OBJCOPY) --add-section=image=kernel --add-section=initrd=initrd.gz

Hmm this is certainly possible.
My impression is that this doesn't currently work on x86.
I would love to be wrong.

> This is done in ppc/boot/Makefile for example. It might be a nice thing
> to add a .config option to optionally specify an initrd to link into
> the kernel image. Similarly, several architectures have a CONFIG_CMDLINE
> which could also do the job (see arch/ppc/config.in for example).
>
> Presumably, by doing such things you could avoid needing to use mkelfImage.

Agreed. And I would like to see that.
With the 2.4 code freeze it is too late to do that today.
Also mkelfImage gives me backwards compatibility for now.