>
> Ah. I guess it's slightly more memory efficient having it take the initrd
> from flash directly than allocating some space, copying it to RAM, then
> having it loaded into more memory in the buffer cache? Otherwise you'll
have
> 2 copies, though one could quite possibly be thrown out after the mount.
The kernel generally reclaims the memory that the initrd was in after it has
been copied into the ramdisk (this is one of the things that needs to be
patched if the initrd is in flash).
I've been working with small devices that have limited DRAM and no disk, so
the memory efficiency issue is important.
That being said, ramdisk does not make the best use of memory -- the whole
filesystem resides in DRAM whether you use it or not. In addition, the
original images resides in Flash (although the flash image will typically be
compressed). I think it's better to use a flash device driver so that only
the blocks of the files that are accessed are copied to DRAM. I've used
both ext2 and cramfs -- the compressed ROM filesystem -- mounted on a flash
device driver. There are several platform-dependent flash drivers
available. The Memory Technology Devices group is working on a
platform-independent framework flash and other memory drivers.
-Jamey
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