Booting from a non block device

Booting from a non block device

[Shane Nay]

I need to get rid of the abstraction that a block device brings because I 
need to run things in XIP (execute in place) mode from our cramfs partition.  
(We have uncompressed and aligned files inter mingled with our cramfs stuff 
so that the entire distro can be updated in a single flash)  The only thing 
that's keeping me from finishing at this point is I can't seem to figure out 
a smart way to accomplish file system direct booting.

The main.c file is hardwired to boot from a block device, and as such I can't 
think of a good way to get around it and put in a filesystem instead.  Should 
I just cheat and put in a fake block device?  Or am I going about this in an 
imbecilic fashion?

Any ideas, criticisms are welcome...
Thanks,
Shane Nay.
(BTW: XIP implementation is by another fellow..., I'm just trying to put 
together the linear addressing and his pieces into one nice unit, and get rid 
of the dev rom copying and unneeded buffering)
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Re: Booting from a non block device

[David Woodhouse]

shane@agendacomputing.com said:
>  The main.c file is hardwired to boot from a block device, and as such
> I can't  think of a good way to get around it and put in a filesystem
> instead.  Should  I just cheat and put in a fake block device?  

That's what NFSroot does. I suppose you could also argue that's what JFFS 
does too, because it doesn't actually _use_ the mtdblock device for 
anything but getting a handle on the underlying MTD device.



--
dwmw2


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