[You (Dale Scheetz)] >On Wed, 7 Jan 1998, Turbo Fredriksson wrote: >> A loop-root?
>With a small patch to the kernel and some modification of the loop device >code, you can create a file-system-in-a-file. You can do this already in stock debian (rex and hamm) with mount -o loop -t <fs> <file> <mount point> Why do you need to patch the kernel for this? >Using the loop device >the internal file system can be mounted as the root file system for the >kernel. These patches were never adopted by the kernel, and it is getting >harder and harder to apply them, so I currently use a patched 2.0.27 >kernel to boot that system. Why do you have to patch the kernel at all? I already have this funcationality w/ initrd. Again, this is on an upatched 2.0.30 and 2.0.32 kernels. BTW, I use it on my custom-rolled boot floppies for debian booting off a floppy for a laptop which runs an initrd w/ cardmgr on it so I could get PCMCIA subsystem up and play with NFS-mounting root. I have a little make file which makes a pretty complete but small initrd file system (using mount -o loop) complete w/ shared libs etc, even ash. It all works, at least to the extent that NFS-root works well at all (which is not much but I haven't gotten around to pestering Joost about it). Alternatively you could use the ramdisk and just mount root in the same basic fashion (although initrd is a little different -- not much really). >The one I boot with lilo is on an ext2 partition (another beauty of the >imbeded file system, it can be coppied to almost any other file system). >Interesting point: on an ext2 file system, no care need be taken. On a DOS >file system the file system must be un-fragmented (using dfrag) before the >DiD installation will work properly. The funny part of this is that it >doesn't matter whether you do the dfrag before you copy the file system, >or afterwards, it still works. Without it you get file system errors. Never noticed this issue on my 'mount -o loop' and initrd scheme. Using SYSLINUX to boot I think. .....A. P. [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/> -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
