[syslinux] SYSLINUX 3.05 released

Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha strange at nsk.no-ip.org
Mon Jan 10 15:00:30 PST 2005


On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 11:34:41PM +0100, Paolo Salvan wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Some lines of your change-log have captured my attention:
> 
> >         * The initrd= option now supports multiple filenames separated
> >           by commas.  This is mostly useful for initramfs, which can
> >           be composed of multiple separate cpio or cpio.gz archives.
> >           (Note: all files except the last one are zero-padded to a 4K
> >           page boundary.  This should not affect initramfs.)
> 
> ...Is this feature something related with the feature I asked the 2004.10.27 in
> the "[syslinux] Passing one more file after initrd to the kernel..." mail?
> 
> To save your time, this is the text of that mail I sent:
> 
> Paolo Salvan ha scritto:
> 
> > Hi!
> >
> > I have a particular need... I'm not sure if this is the right place to
> > ask, but surely here there are people that can say me if it is feasible
> > or not...
> >
> > I'm working for a thin-client distribution (thinstation.sf.net); I want
> > to boot it from various media (netowork, cdrom, hd, usb key...), and at
> > the moment syslinux/isolinux/pxelinux are doing it very well...
> >
> > The problem is that the distribution is composed by a kernel, an initrd
> > and a CONFIGURATION TEXT FILE, some kb-long, that should be read by the
> > system after boot...
> >
> > At the moment I'm solving the problem instaling modules for all the unit
> > types (cd, hd, usb...) and fs (iso, fat), mounting the boot unit and
> > reading this file after boot...
> >
> > It would be quite a cleaner solution if I could pass this file to the
> > system directly during the boot phase, tghether woth kernel params and
> > initrd... and later if I could read this file in someway after the boot
> > (ie in the dev/ or proc/ path)
> >
> > In this way the file would be read using BIOS drivers, and if the system
> > can boot I would be sure that my conf file would also be read, without
> > needing to know which filesystem the system has been booted from, and
> > without requiring my mini-system to have a lot of driver used only to
> > load this small file...

Yes, you can do it with the initrd=... mechanism. But either your initrd
is a cpio archive and you will have to put the configuration into a cpio
archive by itself (the cpio is supposed to support concatenated
archives, isn't it?), or you use a normal disk image, the text is
appended to the end, and you'll have to do some magic to retrieve the
data from the end of the device.

Regards,
Luciano Rocha




More information about the Syslinux mailing list