I have a simple x86_64 system based on Morty, and I'm trying to understand the way the system boots. The disk image file is a FAT16 parition which I use as the second partition on my SSD, with the boot flag set. (The first partition is a FAT16 partition that contains a bunch of data files and my application.) The boot partition contains a file called rootfs.img, which obviously is my rootfs.
GRUB is the boot manager on this 64-bit system, and it puts up a menu of four items that allows me to specify graphics or serial as the console, and either booting or installing. After booting, I see that rootfs.img is loop mounted as the root. My questions are: 1) Is this a "live image" boot? As I understand it, a live image is a system that boots from removable media, and gives the user a choice between copying its rootfs to a RAM disk and running a volatile session from there, or installing the rootfs somewhere. Since I see "install" menu items in GRUB, that suggests that this is a live image. But at runtime the rootfs appears to be on the actual drive, not in RAM, because my command history persists across reboots. 2) Why do I have a FAT partition with a loop mounted root file system, in the first place? Is it possible to boot directly into a plain ext3 partition? I tried using the ext3 partition image as-is, but it hung on boot if I used an MBR, and complained there wasn't a bootable partition if I used a GPT. -- Ciao, Paul D. DeRocco Paul mailto:pdero...@ix.netcom.com -- _______________________________________________ yocto mailing list yocto@yoctoproject.org https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto