Greetings, i have been prototyping a design using the avnet V4FX12 mini module board running linux
i have been NFS mounting my root partition for the time being but now i want to use initrd and have a ramdisk with my root partition i have built a zImage.initrd.elf which i can download with xmd and run and it works fine up until now i've been using the simple bootloader application that comes with the Xilinx EDK to boot linux off the flash memory that is included on the board however the EDK bootloader needs the file its booting to be in SREC format which takes up close to 3x the space of the ELF file. when i create an SREC file of the image containing the linux kernel and the root filesystem, its too big to fit in the flash (4M). however the zImage.initrd.elf file is less than 3 megs in size. whats the best/easiest way for me to boot from an ELF file in the flash ? i'm aware of u-boot but it seems like overkill for this application. however if it would work and the footprint is relatively small i could give it a try. i imagine i could write my own bootloader, i just thought i'd ask first to avoid reinventing the wheel. another somewhat related question is whether i can use a portion of the flash (the part thats left over after the kernel/root fs image is programmed) as nonvolatile storage using the JFFS2 filesystem ? anyone have any pointers to information on how to set this up ? thanks for any and all advice, -rimas
