Hi, I'm an user, not a dev, but I own a lemote mini-pc, not the laptop, and the linux kernel for loongson-2f can be loaded through initrd. Actually that's the way archloong does it. This doesn't have anything to do to the ability to boot with grub. Actually archloong does not support grub (neither any other bootloader on top of pmon) at all for lemote products...
Even when gNewSense has been able to make grub work, not sure if only for laptops, or mini-pcs included, on debian this is broken for mini-pcs, when trying to load the initrd the machine just goes to limbo. So I'd suggest not to depend upon grub to make decisions about the kernel or initrd... That said, I think using an initrd should be no problem, given that other distros are using it. But this ability should not depend upont grub. Whether because grub is broken, or because people wan to still use the pmon bootloader, or because enabling pmon as a backup when things go wrong with grub, people should still be able to load the initrd, or to use an ext4 root FS. Notice also that to get ext4 support for root, there's no need for initrd either. It could be gotten by providing direct native support in the kernel. This sounds like the safest, cause then mounting the root FS will work no matter something else is broken, like loading the initrd or booting through grub... In the case of archloong, the dev decided to support initrd, and still ext4 is compiled directly within the kernel, not as a module, and it doesn't have problems having root FS being ext4... Thanks, -- Javier. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
