Warning "Contains linux content" Was: Re: [OT] Re: [plug] File Conversions

[Daniel Foote]

> OBLC: I had a fun weekend converting an entire Debian etch system to boot and run from initramfs
> rather than an nfs root. It's pretty minimal but the initramfs is about 60MB and loads over PXE. The
> whole thing runs from tmpfs and does the job very nicely. Live and learn, I wondered if it could be
> done.

If I may, how did you make that work? Just the other day I set up two
machines to netboot and use a remote NFS root (the same NFS root - the
debian package nfs-booted has a number of tweaks to make this work
properly - creating RAM disks for things like /var/log).

I was also a few weeks ago trying to netboot an ancient 386 just for
kicks, and was thinking of using a very small initrd for it's root. So
far, I've made the machine boot a kernel, but that's about it. I have
two things working against me: the machine has 8MB of RAM, and Debian
is compiled for 486 or better machines these days... resulting in code
that won't run on that machine... I had to manually compile a kernel
for it, but 2.6.21 boots quite happily on it.

Thanks!

Daniel Foote.