Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 29 Dec 2004 14:15:25 -0500 | From | William Park <> | Subject | Re: waiting 10s before mounting root filesystem? |
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On Wed, Dec 29, 2004 at 12:49:02PM +0000, Paulo Marques wrote: > William Park wrote: > >[...] > > > >Ideally, motherboard should support booting from USB key drive > >directly. I'm told that most modern motherboards do support usbboot, > >but my machine doesn't. So, I trying to load the kernel from floppy > >(harddisk for testing purpose). This is part of my attempt to build > >Linux thin-client out of mini-ITX type of computer (Via CLE266 > >chipset, Via C3 cpu). > > > >Now, I need to find a machine that actually can do usbboot... > > You will have the same problem even if the BIOS supports booting from > USB. The BIOS will load the bootloader and map the USB drive as if it > were a regular disk, so that the INTxx calls (can't say the number > from memory) that LILO (or another bootloader) uses to load the kernel > and initrd into memory will work. > > After that, the kernel boots the same way as if it were loaded from a > floppy. It still needs to discover the USB drive to mount the root > filesystem, and that will still take the 5 seconds you were > complaining about.
Ah, right.
> > As Trent Lloyd already mentioned, you could solve this using a small > initrd and a "nash" script, instead of patching the kernel, although > I'm in favor of a patch of this sort getting into mainline.
I read Documentation/initrd.txt and I don't understand it. If I understand it right, I have to build a complete root filesystem with all the stuffs necessary for mounting the second (real) root filesystem. If I'm loading the kernel from floppy, then I only have 200k to work with. I'll try initrd.txt, step by step over the holidays.
> > After all, what is the use of kernel saying "Panic, can not mount the > root filesystem" instead of saying "humm... no root file system there. > Let me try again in a second or so and see if anything as come up..."?
-- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca> Open Geometry Consulting, Toronto, Canada Linux solution for data processing. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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