Hannah Schroeter wrote:

>Hello!
>
>On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 10:55:14PM +0100, Rickard Dahlstrand wrote:
>
>
>>[...]
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>>
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>
>
>>>>RAM is getting cheaper and the devices I'm using right now have at least
>>>>256 MB of ram. The ramdisk-kernels have many advantages for the systems
>>>>I build the limited ramdisk-size is making it hard to get things done.
>>>>When using Flashboot and the ramdisk kernels you have a limit of
>>>>currently 14 MB if I have understand Damien's text from the flashboot
>>>>readme-file. Is this limit static or it there something that can be changed.
>>>>
>>>>
>
>
>
>>>Perhaps you could have a relatively small ramdisk as root filesystem,
>>>and later mount a MFS and populate it from somewhere, e.g. a readonly fs
>>>
>>>
>>>from flash (mount_mfs ... -P) or by restore(8)ing a (optionally
>>
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>>>gzipped/bzip2'ed) dump.
>>>
>>>
>
>
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>>Yes, that's the approach I'm using now, but it would be so nice to have
>>more stuff in the default dist. like Perl, Apache etc.
>>
>>
>
>Could you explain what's your real problem with having them in the
>second stage, i.e. in the mfs? mfs has much less restrictive size limits
>than the kernel ramdisk (rd) device.
>
>So your flash could be laid out like this:
>a: enough to hold /boot, perhaps /etc/boot.cf, and /bsd
> /bsd is gzipped and has an initial ramdisk with just enough to
> make the secondary mfs
>d: either a ffs or even just raw data for populating the mfs
>
>The initialization that's contained in the initial ramdisk creates
>a big enough mfs and populates it, e.g. using some
> dd if=/dev/rsd0d bs=512 | bunzip2 | restore -r -f -
>(assuming that the flash is sd0) combo. In the compressed dump
>in sd0d, there's everything you need, including your perl and
>apache and whatever.
>
>Perhaps have an e: partition for variable data that you want to
>survive between boots, and mount that in some way.
>
>What of your *real* goals (i.e. *what* you want, not your ideas
>of *how* you want to do it) wouldn't be achieved that way?
>
>
Hi Hannah,

Well, your right, I don't really need to have a bigger initial ramdisk,
but I was just wondering why there is a limit and if this limit can be
expanded in some way. If this is not the case or if people feel that
there is no need for such a change then I will continue to use a
secondary ramdisk.

Rickard.