Tyson D Sawyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I wouldn't be too quick to understate the value of small. My system happens to > have plenty of FLASH, RAM and disk space, but many don't. Small is almost always > a virtue for embedded applications and linux has a big future in small devices. > The good news is that most embedded apps don't guess at what hardware they are > using.
I'm not giving up on small. I just that I don't believe that a kernel that boots/initrd pair that boots on every embedded platfrom out there is a big deal. > How is the cpio archive given to the kernel? Does it differ much from a > compressed initrd? There are no functional differences forseen in how it is passed. The only big changes is that you can have multiple optionally cpio archives. Allowing for building up the final image on the fly. > What options are there for setting kernel command line options on boot time > using the ELF mechanism? I have an optional parameter passing mechanism that allows that. > It would seem that using a standardized ELF kernel loading mechanism doesn't > have to be incompatible with a cpio archive for populating an initramfs. Load > the ELF kernel, load the cpio image, pass the kernel any needed args and jump to > it. This doesn't seem radically different from the kernel finding other > resources while initializing. The cpio archive is just an other resource in the > system that the kernel uses. Exactly. Eric
