Hi, Brian J. Murrell wrote: > I wonder what the feasibility is of instead of putting a linux kernel in > the kernel portion of the flash image and essentially what's an initrd > in the filesystem portion (because remember, all the / in the flash > image does for me is mount USB storage on /), putting a simple boot > loader that can load the kernel from the USB storage based filesystem. > > It's worth recognizing and mentioning that perhaps this boot loader > could actually be a full linux kernel and a very small / that simply > "kexec"s a new kernel from the USB storage once it's mounted at /. I > wonder how portable kexec is amongst the processors Linux runs on.
This is close to what we do for the PS3 game console (powerpc64). We use an initramfs so have a single (kernel + filesystem) image that is put into flash. We use petitboot for the UI. It can load kernels via nfs, http, tftp, usb mass storage, etc. It also understands how to use the info returned from the dhcp server to load a kernel. We have an ncurses petitboot UI also that can be used over telnet, but it is being re-worked currently and has not been committed to the OpenWrt repo yet. The whole of petitboot is being reworked and that rework will provide better support for other platforms. http://ozlabs.org/~jk/projects/petitboot/ http://git.infradead.org/ps3/petitboot-multiple-ui-patches.git -Geoff _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org http://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
