Re: Linux-2.1.92 - Feature Freeze

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
5 Apr 1998 01:34:29 GMT

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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