[syslinux] Adding memdisk or similar when booting linux

[Kjetil.Mikkelborg at kongsberg.com]

> > 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. ;)
>

Actually the driverdisk directive in anaconda is usefull enough in itself, but has one big drawback, it cannot be used for network drivers, and in my experience, this is almost more frequent than disk controller need when dealing with different hardware vendors.

A really nice have here would be to have a generic network driver like whats available in windows, but as far as I know, there is none for linux? Even just to allow downloading of a driver disk in slow 10mbit would still do the trick :)

--Kjetil