[syslinux] INITRD > MEMSIZE / 2

[Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 10:51:53AM -0500, Gerry Dubois wrote:
> I’ve got a 512M machine and a 330M ( uncompressed ) initrd image. How can I
> mount the ramdisk? Normal booting seems to want to copy the entire initrd
> image into a Ramdisk, thus requiring 2X the memory. So what happens is the
> kernel boots correctly and I get,
> RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
> RAMDISK: Loading 330000 blocks [ 1 disk ] into ram disk
> And then I never see the light of day after that

>  
> Compressing the ramdisk doesn’t help because it’s basically already
> compressed ( a giant 290M tarball used as part of an installation process
> run from /linuxrc). After scouring the net I though I would be able to mount
> the initrd directly using /dev/initrd, but that didn’t seem to work.
>  
> Can anybody point me in the right direction?

You can have a small initrd that mounts the cdrom, a tmpfs device, untars
the files over that fs over that fs and then does a pivot_root, etc..

That's how I do it, with support for several tar.gzs that work as packages. :)

Regards,
Luciano Rocha