[syslinux] Adding memdisk or similar when booting linux

[H. Peter Anvin]

Kjetil.Mikkelborg at kongsberg.com wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Thanx guys for the help on understanding howto read dmi info!
> I now have a custom boot menu for install of different linux versions based if they have been installed before (reinstall is ok for users, first install is not), and installquirks like if we detect odd hardware, we add install options to redhat installer so it can install anyhow (for instance hp dc7800 who needs pci=nommconf as kernel append for booting).
> 
> But now I need to add a driver disk to my install enviroment, and when thinking about it, the nice method would be having syslinux create a memdisk which linux could see when starting install, and load its drivers from there. The reason i need a memdisk image (or similar), is since often the driver I need is a network driver, which offcourse is a tad difficult getting from the net _After_ the kernel have taken over.
> 
> Embedding the initrd would be an option, but would require me to change all install initrd's for every driver I put in my driver disk, and also it would require me to also allways modify new releases with custom initrd. But with a memdisk approach, the only image who would need attention would be the driver disk image alone (which actually supports multi versions)
> 
> Is there any clean approches to achive this? like starting first memdisk, load a image to it, and then start linux (all thru pxelinux?)
> 

Writing a COM32 module to construct an initramfs on the fly might be the 
best of all worlds.  That way the COM32 module can download the specific 
drivers it needs.

The library support for that is already there.

	-hpa