Michael Schmitz wrote: > > > > That's the bootloader's job on PPC. With a sane OF implementation, your > > > boot loader would be yaboot and something like initrd=<of-path to > > > ramdisk> and append="root=/dev/ram" should do. > > > > > Is this functionality missing from the PPC or is it just convention to > > let the bootloader handle this? > > Convention. You sure can compile in something to initialize the command > line in the kernel but most people prefer to keep that in the bootstrap > (which isn't as limited as on Intel in size). > > > My problem with having the bootloader do this is that we're writing our > > own bootloader and I don't want to make it any more complex than it has > > to be. > > Your call. You can hardcode the command line and ramdisk path in the > loader as well. The loader needs to know where to find the ramdisk anyway, > right? (The kernel cannot load the ramdisk from some other storage BTW.) >
Do you mean that the kernel and root image need to live on the same device? So if the kernel is on a floppy disk the root image can't be on the hard disk. Or it can be made to always pass root=/dev/ram as command line if > all you'll ever do is use a ramdisk as root filesystem. I'll definitely always use /dev/ram as the root device but I think I need to have the root image be configurable. Making a rdev > equivalent for PPC cannot be that tough either, it just hasn't been done > because no one thought it useful. I've only read the man pages for rdev and I'm still not clear on how it works. Does it mask a word in the kernel that has all of the information on where to locate the root image? If that's all it does I don't see why it wouldn't work for the PPC. Unless that word lives in a different location on the PPC. Thanks, Andy
