On 2021-03-27 23:40, Joshua Kinard wrote:
The MIPS machine has functioning local disk drives, and currently, it boots fine by just pulling a kernel off my TFTP server and booting from the local drive, no initramfs needed because I compiled everything into it.
Out of curiosity, if your kernel images already come from the TFTP servers why not simply put separate initramfs files there too?
I wonder if there's a small C program out there that can call whatever the kernel functions are to mount a disk partition that could be embedded into a tiny initramfs, then pivot_root to $REAL_ROOT and run /bin/init?
You might be interested in this FOSDEM 2020 talk: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/ema_boot_linux_only/Not exactly what you have asked for but the problem they are trying to solve is the same as yours - boot Linux on a system whose first-stage bootloader impose considerable size constraints. And since it uses kexec at its core, it's essentially what Rich has suggested - except it's already been (at least partially) done :-)
-- MS
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