Re: [cobalt-developers] Can the RaQ boot from floppy or CD?

[Norbert Bollow <nb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim Hockin <thockin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Now, I haven't tried it with a CD (read only), so I have honestly NO
> IDEA what will happen.  I have used other disk devices, and have had
> success.

The typical boot CD from a Linux distribution uses a hack to
create a ramdisk with a root filesystem that can be mounted r/w;
that particular hack won't work on the RaQ.

However that doesn't mean that it would be impossible to create
a boot CD for the RaQ.

As soon as the kernel has been started, it will execute
/sbin/init and what will happen then will depend on the contents
of the /etc/inittab file, and on the contents of the rc
directories that are referenced there. It shouldn't be too hard
to write an init script that will create a ramdisk, mount it
r/w eg on /mnt/ramdisk, and populate it with all files and
directories (including device files) that need to be on a
writable partition. (Of course there will have to be a lot of
symbolic links on the CD, like /var -> /mnt/ramdisk/var, /tmp ->
/mnt/ramdisk/tmp, /dev/ptya0 -> /mnt/ramdisk/dev/ptya0 etc etc)
Set things up so that this init script is executed first. Then
everything should work as normal.

I'm not planning to do this, but if someone does it I'd like to
buy a copy of that CD.

Warm greetings, Norbert.


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