On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 03:35:15PM -0500, Dan Malek wrote:
> Tibor Polgar wrote:
>
> > 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 regularly do this with compressed kernels (zImage) on PowerPC, ARM, and
> Alchemy MIPS processors. I attach the compressed ramdisk to the zImage,
> usually with "cat" and some shell scripts. The zImage uncompressor code
> will relocate the ramdisk (and potentially ask for additional kernel
> command line parameters) and will tell the kernel where the ramdisk is
> located. I don't have to recompile the kernel to do this, and best of
> all it doesn't require any special boot rom knowledge of the image. It
> works with all boot roms that can load a binary image into a memory location
> (not everyone uses RedBoot) :-) Another advantage is exactly the same
> image that you repeatedly test by loading over tftp or with a debugger
> can be written into flash memory without modification. It removes the
> need to actually have to write to flash to test the image that will be
> eventually written to flash. You just jump to the start of the image to
> uncompress/relocate/initialize/jump to kernel regardless of where it
> is located.
>
Looks like you have the solution that I called for. :-)
>
> There are a couple of things keeping me from making a patch for the MIPS
> kernel. This method is in conflict with the "compiled in" ramdisk method,
> and reserving the "bootmem" pages to ensure the kernel doesn't allocate the
> compressed ramdisk pages before they are freed doesn't work well compared
> to other architectures. I'm still running on luck with this latter problem,
> but I think I can fix it. I don't know yet what to do about the conflicts
> and assumptions made about the compiled-in ramdisk.
>
The compiled-in one uses a configure option. Perhaps you can rely on that
to differentiate? Once the new method get stable, I am in favor to
covert all embedded ramdisk to the new one.
Jun
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