Messages in this thread | | | From | (H. Peter Anvin) | Subject | Re: Linux-2.1.92 - Feature Freeze | Date | 5 Apr 1998 01:34:29 GMT |
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Followup to: <6g6m3g$53m@pell.pell.portland.or.us> By author: o.r.c@transmeta.com (david parsons) In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > I suspect a lot of that is because of the documentation for it. > > I do what is basically an initrd as part of the Mastodon > distribution, but instead of setting up an initrd, I just do all the > steps by hand and leave the user with a system that contains a 1.4mb > black hole that used to contain the ramdisk. > > I've looked at the documentation in Documentation/initrd.txt, but > then my head starts hurting and I start looking around for a way to > do BIOS floppy access instead. I admit that it just may be that > I'm old and resistant to change (libc 5.0.9, anyone?), but I have > been working on Unix systems for over 20 years now and, if the > documentation is too esoteric for me, it may be too esoteric for > other people as well. >
I guess I never really read the docs (I learned it from a boot-loader-writer's perspective), but basically, this is the idea:
- Use a boot loader such as recent versions of SYSLINUX, LILO, or LOADLIN to load the kernel and the initrd. If you're loading from a floppy, I would strongly suggest looking at SYSLINUX, but I'm of course biased.
- When the initrd comes up, it will run /linuxrc (usually a shell script) on that disk.
- /linuxrc will typically write the device number of the real root device to /proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev
- When /linuxrc exits, the kernel will mount the real root device and continue.
-hpa
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