[syslinux] Syslinux: Multi-Disks [feature]

[H. Peter Anvin]

Clifford Wolf wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Christian Marg wrote:
> 
> 
>>Perhaps you shouldn't try to get that from your Bootloader. Initrd was
>>afaik for having a minimalistic system before the System boots:
>>Load the Kernel from the first floppy (Prepaired according to Bootdisk
>>HOWto; the older kernels did support: dd if=vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0)
>>Load a small initrd from the second floppy, let the init from the initrd
>>load the root filesystem of your distributions installer. (using for
>>example gunzip -c | dd -skip  1440 bs=1k of=/dev/ram0; Read Manpage for
>>parameters, I didn't look them up now.)
> 
> 
> Don't use a minimalistic initrd for this. Instead just use
> 
> 	root=/dev/fd load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=4096
> 
> and the kernel will load prompt for the ramdisk floppy and load (including
> gzip uncompression) the ramdisk from it.

... although you'll be hosed if you don't have a legacy floppy disk and
instead have something like USB or IDE floppies.

> In 2.5 you can do something like you described above with initrams, a gzip
> compressed cpio archive which is linked to the kernel as seperate section
> and automatically decompressed into a ramfs on bootup. The kernel also
> frees this memory section after the filesystem content has been extracted.

initramfs is really quite similar to initrd from a user perspective.
Internally it's really different, though :)

	-hpa