[klibc] initramfs as an initrd replacement

[Rogelio M.Serrano Jr.]

Im sorry for being slightly off topic.

I understand from this thread that the initramfs stuff is already 
working and that we can can start writing software so we can offload 
most of the boot magic in the kernel? Is it necessary to wait for 
klibc to start doing that? I thought klibc must be finished first.

On 2003-10-14 19:28:51 +0800 dododge at smart.net wrote:

>> One of the things I am working on requires me to have a kernel and an
>> initrd (as root filesystem , based on busybox) in one single image.
> 
> I'm doing something along these lines as well (end goal in my case is
> a livecd to run a game on a diskless system). At the moment I'm
> PXE-booting 2.6.0-test7 with a uClibc/busybox initramfs as the root
> filesystem.
> 
>> As a test, I made a cpio archive of my own for the kernel source 
>> (plain
>> 2.6.0-test5).  Everything gets unpacked just fine during boot. 
>> Somehow I
>> was expecting that there would be a way to have it execute its own
>> /sbin/init and stay in ramfs - but I do not know how to get this to
>> work. The best I could come up with was modifying /init/do_mounts.c 
>> to skip
>> over all the initrd loading stuff - then it worked.
> 
> Same here. The only way I got this to work was to modify do_mounts.c.
> I inserted a one-liner to skip the mount_root call if I boot with
> "root=0:0". Someone else has posted a similar patch to the mailing
> list archives, and I think it's in the -mm series kernel.
> 
>> My question is, is there a  way to use an initramfs archive as a
>> rootfilesystem, without patching the kernel source?
> 
> Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but I don't see any way to do 
> this
> with a stock kernel.
> _______________________________________________
> klibc mailing list
> klibc at zytor.com
> http://www.zytor.com/mailman/listinfo/klibc
>