On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 04:42:34AM +0100, Greg Buchholz wrote: > > On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Philip Charles wrote: > > For a GNU live CD to work a hurdish ramdisk would have to be created and > > setup at the initial boot. If this could be done we could also use this > > to create a native GNU installer. At the moment the CDs have to use a > > Linux ramdisk and then reboot into GNU once the HDD has been setup. I can > > think of no way of rebooting into a ramdisk. > > Can this ramdisk be a regular hurd translator? Or does it have to > be a special beast because the full system isn't up and running? I'm > guessing it must be the hard one (anyone care to venture a guess?), > because it seems like a ram disk would be one of the easier translators to > make. I'm sure this has probably been discussed before, so I'll google > around to see what I can come up with.
We already have tmpfs which runs on raw memory and doesn't need any filesystem. But tmpfs is buggy. You can also always use a store made up from fresh memory, but that store would then need to be initialized with a filesystem (I think you use "-T copy zero:16M" for a 16MB RAM store, or so). A more Hurdish approach would be to have a unionfs translator laid on top of a regular read only filesystem. There are prototypes of such unionfs filesystems implemented, but more work would be required. Maybe for version 2? Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/