On 2/6/07, Joe Ciccone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Colin Dean wrote: > > I'm in the process of building CLFS with the intention of making a > > bootable CD that proceeds to load the entire OS onto a RAMdisk, using > > the remainder of the available RAM for regular...RAM purposes, hehe. > > > > Any of you know of good reading material that may point me towards that > > which I seek? > > > > Some Googling yielded initrd tutorials, but I think that initrd is meant > > more for a temporary part of the boot process than running the entire > > system for an indeterminate amount of time. > > > > http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-initrd.html > > > > That DeveloperWorks tutorial on initrd appeals to me. If ya'll think > > that the initrd may work in my case, then I'll probably follow it. > You may want to look into using device mapper to mount a root image (so > that it's writable without massive memory requirements). > > Instead of an initrd I'd look into including an initramfs image that > locates the CD, mounts it, does whatever it needs todo to mount the > image, then does a pivot_root into the image's root. I think this is (or > is atleast similar to) what the lfs-livecd does. > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Clfs-support mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.cross-lfs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/clfs-support >
Hmm, actually, look into the bootscripts for DSL, there's a "toram" boot time option that does just that with their system ... but you may learn more from an older version's bootscripts, as a lot of it's harder to follow since they started using unionfs and such. My idea, however: Load a small initramfs (containing mount and either cp or tar+gzip, busybox could handle the job nicely) that mounts a tmpfs based filesystem (make sure to set the max size large enough), then copy a filesystem image into that and mount (or just untar a system into the tmpfs), then pivotroot into the new system ... there's no data persistency, but it should run very fast and relatively clean (assuming no major memory leaks). -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy _______________________________________________ Clfs-support mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cross-lfs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/clfs-support
