On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 05:07:38AM -0700, Michel Lespinasse wrote: > On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 11:36:51AM +0100, Thiemo Seufer wrote: > > Michel Lespinasse wrote: > > > In other words, it was all my fault. Now I'm trying to figure out how to > > > convince gxemul to start a debian kernel with the debian initrd... > > > > I wonder why this is a problem, the DECstation installer images already > > contain the initrd. If gxemul is good enough at emulating a DECstation > > harddisk/cdrom you can boot from the mini.iso installer image. If the > > emulator supports netboot, then the boot.img should work. > > > > The separate kernel and initrd binaries are only needed to build bigger > > CD images. The delo package contains the 'delo' and 't-rex' commands > > to create bootable images. > > What happens is that t-rex builds an ecoff image, I suppose this is what > the firmware on a real decstation would boot. However gxemul does not have > any firmware, it only knows how to load an ELF file and get it started. > Well supposedly it should also be able to load a binary file such as the > initrd image, but for some reason I've been unable to figure out the glue > to make that work. So what I need is the debian kernel + initrd image > in a single ELF file. > > The way to go apparently is to build a kernel with the mips config option > CONFIG_EMBEDDED_RAMDISK so that the initrd image is embedded with the > kernel image. I'll try that tomorrow and see what happens. Incidently > this is also how I got confused as I did not know my kernel image had > such an embedded initrd image (with the sarge installer... grumpf :)
Please have a look at the powerpc mkvmlinuz package, which was done to do exactly this, and could be extended or copied for your particular case. Basically, it puts all the arch/powerpc/boot stuff into the package, and then does the post-installation linking of the vmlinux+initrd into a zImage with builtin ramdisk. I heard from Maks that mips/mipsel just recently had support for working initramfs (at least with regard to initramfs-tools), and the d-i images are still cramfs right now. Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
