Joshua Murphy wrote: > On 2/6/07, Joe Ciccone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> 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.
What all needs to be included in the initramfs image? I can't seem to find a tutorial on how to make one. I did read the Makefile for the initramfs part of LFS 6.2, as well as the init.c file, but I didn't really understand a lot of it. > 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. I'll check that out. > 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). My plan thus far is this: 1. Get LFS's initramfs package. 2. Create mini fs with uclibc, busybox 3. Modify init.c to mount a ~50 MB tmpfs filesystem 4. Untar entire real filesystem image to tmpfs 5. pivot_root into the new filesystem I know I more-or-less just made a list out of that last paragraph, but it helps me know more of what I'm doing. Can I use the same procedure to boot from USB, too? It seems to me that the only difference, at least in the way I'm doing it, is the bootloader: for the CD, I'll use SYSLINUX/ISOLINUX, and for USB, well, I don't know yet--GRUB? Here's the thing, though: my entire FS is going to be probably under 20 MB. CLFS out-of-the-box is around 12 MB, and I'm in the process of adding PHP, an SNMP daemon, and some other little things to help run this (it's a mini-router distro I'm making for my graduation project www.cs.westminster.edu/~cdean/capstone ). Would I be able to just mount the entire FS as the initramfs and not bother with pivoting? _______________________________________________ Clfs-support mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cross-lfs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/clfs-support
