[syslinux] Adding memdisk or similar when booting linux

[Luciano Rocha]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:43:05AM +0100, Kjetil.Mikkelborg at kongsberg.com wrote:
<snip>
> Hey, cool, same results on a redhat enterprise 4u4 box so yes redhat does use initramfs, but NOT in its install enviroment.
> zcat /media/cdrom/images/pxeboot/initrd.img > /tmp/t
> file /tmp/t
> /tmp/t: Linux rev 1.0 ext2 filesystem data

Ah, well, if it is when installing RHEL, then you don't need to care
about the other stuff (linux boot process differs), because you won't be
booting something else besides the initrd.

> I tried converting it, and just copying the content of initrd to a initramfs archive did boot (and addition of /init -> /sbin/init) but anaconda bailed on remounting /dev so the problem actually occured inside anaconda (did not expect to not being able to bindmount or remount its enviroment).

There's probably a mount / -o remount,rw, that may fail due that / isn't
in a block device.

> My next action now is to see if I can make a initramfs which can setup a initrd enviroment, and chroot to it. If so, I could make this enviroment copy its content from /dd.img to /initrdrooot/dd.img, but my main concern now is that this is still no very scalable.. how can i handle  more than one driver disk ?
> (and if this approach will work at all ;))

Driverdisks can be defined in a kickstart file, multiple times, I think,
using remote locations:

driverdisk (optional)

      driverdisk <partition>|--source=<url> [--type=<fstype>]

      <partition>
          o Partition containing the driver disk.
      --source=<url>
          o Specify a URL for the driver disk. NFS locations can be
            given with nfs:host:/path/to/img.

      --type=
          o File system type (for example, vfat or ext2).

I suppose the dd= argument to anaconda accepts an url, but I'll have to
check the sources.

If this does what you need, then you'll just have to create a com32
module that constructs the correct command-line to anaconda and not
messing around with initrds. ;)

-- 
lfr
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