Next Previous Contents

5. Advanced booting with initrd

This chapter covers the more esoteric booting options, namely those that involve an initial ram disk (initrd). The casual user can safely skip this chapter. The features described in this chapter are subject to change.

5.1 Preparing the ram disk

To get started, an empty ram disk should be created. The following example creates an empty filesystem of about 4 MB. There are no particular restrictions on the size of the disk at this point, but making it needlessly large will just consume RAM when the machine is running later on.

        dd if=/dev/zero of=myramdisk bs=1k count=4096
        mke2fs -F myramdisk
        insmod loop
        mount -oloop myramdisk /mnt

The disk can now be populated by copying files into /mnt. Keep in mind that for each binary, all necessary libraries and configuration files must be installed as well. Finally, you should create a file called /mnt/linuxrc and make it executable. This script will be run when the disk is booted. The chroot command is helpful for testing out the disk before installing it. Once you are satisfied, the next step is to unmount, then compress the disk image:

        umount /mnt
        gzip myramdisk

This will produce a file called myramdisk.gz. There are size restrictions on this compressed ram disk image, as explained in the next section. If your image is too large, you'll have reduce the number of files you put into the image.

5.2 Installation and booting

The compressed ram disk image can either be burned into the flash memory chip, or it can be fetched via TFTP when the NetWinder boots. The first option allows for diskless, networkless booting of a NetWinder, while the second option allows a somewhat larger ram disk to be loaded.

Adding the image to the flash

The compressed disk image can be written to the unused portion of the flash memory. The proceedure is to simply join the compressed image on to the end of a standard nettrom binary image, and then to write the combined image into the flash memory:

        cat nettrom-2.0.X.bin myramdisk.gz >combined.img
        insmod nwflash
        flashwrite -base64 combined.img 0

NetWinders normally have 1 MB of flash memory, with the top 64 kB reserved for configuration data. The total size of `combined.img' must not exceed 983040 bytes (that's 1 MB minus 64 kB), otherwise it won't work (and if you were expecting a little warning message to be printed if you exceed the size, guess again...)

To try out the image, reboot the NetWinder and go into the firmware control menu. Issue the command setenv initrd flash, save the parameters if you wish, and boot it. If you've done things correctly, your ram disk will be loaded and the linuxrc script will be run.

Loading the image by tftp

A somewhat larger initial ram disk can be loaded via TFTP protocol over the network. This option is only available with version 2.0.7 of the NetWinder firmware. The compressed ram disk should be concatenated onto a normal NetWinder kernel. The maximum allowable size of the combined kernel and compressed filesystem is 4 MB (ie. 4194304 bytes). Please note that at this time, only ELF kernels (ie. most 2.0.35 kernels) will work - the 2.2 kernel series are not recognized as ELF and the ramdisk won't be detected. This will be fixed in an upcoming nettrom.

        cat /boot/vmlinux myramdisk.gz >vmlinux+ramdisk

The resulting file vmlinux+ramdisk should be transfered to the TFTP server machine, perhaps via ftp or nfs. The NetWinder should then be rebooted and the firmware settings for TFTP booting should be activated:

        setenv kernconfig tftp
        setenv kerntftpserver 10.2.3.4
        setenv kerntftpfile vmlinux+ramdisk

Of course the IP address and filename will need to be adjusted for your particular setup. For more details, consult the TFTP example in the `Using the firmware' chapter.

5.3 Serial booting

It is possible to download a kernel via the serial port. This is intended for emergency situations only where the flash memory doesn't contain a valid boot image. See the last section in the `Updating the firmware' chapter for details.


Next Previous Contents