On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 09:20:23PM +0300, Cyril Plisko wrote: > On 8/17/05, Sven Luther <sven.luther at wanadoo.fr> wrote: > > On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 04:56:37PM +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote: > > > Cyril Plisko <cyril.plisko at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > > > let me disagree with you. Since we have nothing working right now > > > > we have quite a load of code to write and test even _before_ we get > > > > to crypto and ATA subsystem. Of course in a sense that we still > > > > will not have a fully pledged distribution you are right and lack > > > > of the basic stuff like the one you mentioned will prevent us > > > > from declaring the job is done. But still one have to start walking > > > > in order to get somewhere. > > > > > > The PPC hardware we use depends on an ATA disk and we need an ATA > > > driver in order to boot. > > > > Can't you netboot with a ramdisk image like linux dies ? > > I guess that should be possible too. Can you describe the Linux > netboot process in more details ? I am quite familiar with how > Solaris does netboot on SPARC and x86, but have to admit > I amnot sure how similar or different Linux netboot is on PPC
Another why would be a NFS root system, this would probably work nicely in the solaris framework. For the ramdisk method, yaboot or grub2 copies the (compressed) initrd in ram, and passes to the booting kernel the address of said ramdisk in r4 or something such. the kernel then accesses this ramdisk, it knows its size, or the end of it, don't remember, and then mapps a filesystem on it. compressed ext2 in a loop (cloop) device, or cramfs usually. The new method will use something called initramfs, which is a group of concatenated cpio archives. I am not familiar with this though. Friendly, Sven Luther
