Rich Freeman <rich0 <at> gentoo.org> writes:
> Generally the kernel is the easiest thing to get off of one of those > LiveDVDs by just sticking the DVD in a drive and reading it (without > booting it). Everything else on the DVD except for the kernel and > initramfs and bootloader tends to go in some big squashfs or the like. > However, the kernel has to be someplace the bootloader can read it, > and that usually means a vmlinuz or whatever on the root directory. Right now the (2) systems are booted up on media, so I cannot test this. (later on I will). > You could probably just use the same kernel on your own system, unless > it has an embedded command line or initramfs (I forget offhand how > overriding either of these works). Yes. scp is my favorite for this.... but I want to look at the actual kernels that are used for bootup of a livedvd and the minimal, for many reasons. > Most bootloaders tend to not > require these, but in some embedded situations you could run into > them. Once upon a time the kernel had a BIOS boot sector in the first > 512 bytes so you could just dd the kernel onto a disk and boot it > (there is still a stub that will tell you to bugger_off_msg if you do > that in arch/x86/boot/header.S). (just a bit of trivial there) Do tell more. Now this would be most useful to me. If you recall (over 6 months ago) I was (am) working on a setup where I can use all of the old systems, drives, usb, and a plethora of embedded boards to run variants of embedded gentoo through minimal gentoo. I particularly got stuck on how to quickly reinstall a system moving media around. If I could just "dd" kernels/images around, I could keep many images/kernels on a server and then boot--> chroot one of those aforementioned "test boxes" and quickly and have a minimal old cpu test system online for hacking. I (temporarily) shelved that project to get clustering going with btrfs, ceph and mesos+spark on gentoo. Naturally, I have bitten off a wee_bit too much, but, life is good! Likewise, meino was (is?) working on porting/hacking the old venerable netconsole.c [1] to some newer embedded boards. Many variants of netconsole.c have existed over the decades..... I think running embedded/minimum gentoos via secure portal is kind of the next step (for me) after figuring out a semantic for being about to use all those old x86 and amd64 boxes for various testings of singular codes and all sorts of custombuilt hardware across the net. That way folks could hack remotely without having to have the specific hardwware. Developing virtually is great, but at some point you have torun the codes on actual hardware. After x86 I'm going to support a variety of arm boards (that run linux). *SO* do tell me more......as I'm curious about your "dd" of kernels and such. > Rich James [1] http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/net/netconsole.c
