Hi Greg, On Fri, Nov 30, 2007 at 09:50:28AM +1000, Greg Ungerer wrote: > > This is due to the almost universal way that images are put > together on ColdFire. The single image file (which is a kernel > and filesystem concatenated) means that the fs needs to be copied > at kernel start to a more suitable place. And this is the > code you are seeing above, _copy_romfs.
I begin to understand. ;-) So this code is needed when the root fs image is concatenated with the kernel but not in the "regular" initramfs-cpio archive? (Maybe like Davidm proposed in an answer to my initrd problem) Thank you for patiently explaining all this to me! > What is the format of the image that you load with uboot? > I assume it is not the usual kernel+filesystem image.bin? > > Sounds like you should conditional out the code in the > startup head.S, if your image format is different. > (Say if you are loading the kernel and romfs/ramdisk > as 2 separate files/loads). It depends - as I did not have time to further investigate the initramfs problem yet I am using two images at the moment. One is the kernel itself in a special U-Boot image file format (compressed and with a checksum), the other is the root filesystem that is just held in flash and used by the kernel directly. The kernel image is generated from vmlinux.bin, which - if configured - does also include the initramfs, but I did not try another method of including a root filesystem yet. Having everything in a single file (like with initramfs) would have several advantages: - only 1 file to update in case of software update - no U-Boot (and flashing cycle) needed during development, the complete image can be loaded to RAM by a debugger - using U-Boot (or probably any other bootloader), the checksum over the complete image allows secure software update or even a rather simple fallback to a different image if one is corrupted The disadvantage is, of course, higher RAM usage because the filesystem is held in RAM during execution. For the moment i conditionaled the _copy_romfs part out and now the kernel starts up reliably. I hope to have time for further investigating all this initramfs/image stuff next week... > Regards > Greg Regards, Wolfgang _______________________________________________ uClinux-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.uclinux.org/mailman/listinfo/uclinux-dev This message was resent by [email protected] To unsubscribe see: http://mailman.uclinux.org/mailman/options/uclinux-dev
