From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262278AbUJZOEF (ORCPT ); Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:04:05 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262277AbUJZOEF (ORCPT ); Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:04:05 -0400 Received: from ms002msg.fastwebnet.it ([213.140.2.52]:51387 "EHLO ms002msg.fastwebnet.it") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262278AbUJZODo (ORCPT ); Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:03:44 -0400 From: Alessandro Amici Organization: B-Open Solutions srl To: hpa@zytor.com (H. Peter Anvin) Subject: Re: Is anyone using the load_ramdisk= option in the kernel still? Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 16:03:30 +0200 User-Agent: KMail/1.6.2 Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <200410261603.30707.lists@b-open-solutions.it> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org hpa, On Tuesday 26 October 2004 05:48, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > So, in short: > > a) Does anyone use the load_ramdisk= option anymore, or is it > legitimate to drop? I'm pretty sure it is used by the Debian installer when bootstrapping from a floppy, but... > b) If it is necessary to retain, does anyone care if this option would > only support gzip format in the future, i.e. NOT support uncompressed > filesystem images? Since a gzip stream is self-terminating, this > takes care of the problem of finding the end, but adds a sizable chunk > of code to the kinit binary. ... the image is read from a raw device (/dev/fd0) and it is gzipped. Booting the installer is probably the only large scale use case for the load_ramdisk parameter. Cheers, Alessandro