Re: Creating a target initrd

[Chris Wilkinson <winstonian36 at gmail dot com>]

The target system uses a EM7220 board with a Redboot bootloader and
has small (8MB) amount of flash of which there is about 2MB available
for zImage.  This doesn't leave much room for building the kernel even
with a just a minimal set of drivers built-in. The standard procedure
for this box is load zImage and initrd.gz into RAM via the serial
y-modem console and exec Redboot to boot the kernel from these. This
then runs the Debian installer and at the end writes the zImage and
initrd.gz to Flash so it will boot from flash next time. That's the
way I've been trying to do it.

Chris

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 6:12 PM, Bill Pringlemeir <bpringle@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> On  9 Oct 2012, thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 8 Oct 2012 09:20:33 -0400, Chris Wilkinson wrote:
>
>>> Is there a facility or option in ct-Ng to have the host build an
>>> initrd for my custom kernel?
>
>> What you want to do is generate an entire Linux system. There are other
>> tools suited for this job, usually called "embedded Linux build
>> systems". You have Buildroot (http://www.buildroot.org), PTXdist
>
> Not mentioned was Ltib.  However, more importantly for the specific
> request of an initrd, there is klibc that is probably the best suite for
> an initrd/initramfs.  However, if your next question is how do I build
> my file system, then all of the other system builders are probably
> better.
>
> Also, an initrd is not needed; you don't need an initrd and can have a
> semi-normal Linux kernel mount a file system directly... and most modern
> versions of Linux would use an initramfs and not an initrd (unless you
> work in a place where the time stopped due to a year 2k bug ;).
>
> Fwiw,
> Bill Pringlemeir.
>
>  http://ltib.org/, https://savannah.nongnu.org/mail/?group=ltib
>  http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/klibc/2.0/
>  http://askubuntu.com/questions/14961/what-is-the-difference-between-initrd-and-initramfs
>
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-- 
-Chris-

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