I?ve got a 512M machine and a 330M ( uncompressed ) initrd image. How can I mount the ramdisk? Normal booting seems to want to copy the entire initrd image into a Ramdisk, thus requiring 2X the memory. So what happens is the kernel boots correctly and I get, RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0 RAMDISK: Loading 330000 blocks [ 1 disk ] into ram disk And then I never see the light of day after that ? Compressing the ramdisk doesn?t help because it?s basically already compressed ( a giant 290M tarball used as part of an installation process run from /linuxrc). After scouring the net I though I would be able to mount the initrd directly using /dev/initrd, but that didn?t seem to work. ? Can anybody point me in the right direction? ? - Gerry
I?ve got a 512M machine and a 330M ( uncompressed ) initrd image. How can I mount the ramdisk? Normal booting seems to want to copy the entire initrd image into a Ramdisk, thus requiring 2X the memory. So what happens is the kernel boots correctly and I get, RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0 RAMDISK: Loading 330000 blocks [ 1 disk ] into ram disk And then I never see the light of day after that ? Compressing the ramdisk doesn?t help because it?s basically already compressed ( a giant 290M tarball used as part of an installation process run from /linuxrc). After scouring the net I though I would be able to mount the initrd directly using /dev/initrd, but that didn?t seem to work. ? Can anybody point me in the right direction? ? - Gerry
On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 10:51:53AM -0500, Gerry Dubois wrote:> I?ve got a 512M machine and a 330M ( uncompressed ) initrd image. How can I > mount the ramdisk? Normal booting seems to want to copy the entire initrd > image into a Ramdisk, thus requiring 2X the memory. So what happens is the > kernel boots correctly and I get, > RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0 > RAMDISK: Loading 330000 blocks [ 1 disk ] into ram disk > And then I never see the light of day after that> ? > Compressing the ramdisk doesn?t help because it?s basically already > compressed ( a giant 290M tarball used as part of an installation process > run from /linuxrc). After scouring the net I though I would be able to mount > the initrd directly using /dev/initrd, but that didn?t seem to work. > ? > Can anybody point me in the right direction?You can have a small initrd that mounts the cdrom, a tmpfs device, untars the files over that fs over that fs and then does a pivot_root, etc.. That's how I do it, with support for several tar.gzs that work as packages. :) Regards, Luciano Rocha
I've got a 512M machine and a 330M ( uncompressed ) initrd image. How can I mount the ramdisk? Normal booting seems to want to copy the entire initrd image into a Ramdisk, thus requiring 2X the memory. So what happens is the kernel boots correctly and I get, RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0 RAMDISK: Loading 330000 blocks [ 1 disk ] into ram disk And then I never see the light of day after that. Compressing the ramdisk doesn't help because it's basically already compressed ( a giant 290M tarball used as part of an installation process run from /linuxrc). After scouring the net I though I would be able to mount the initrd directly using /dev/initrd, but that didn't seem to work. Can anybody point me in the right direction? - Gerry