Re: Is anyone using the load_ramdisk= option in the kernel still?

[Jesper Juhl]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 hpa@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 03:48:40 +0000 (UTC)
> From: hpa@xxxxxxxxx
> To: linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Is anyone using the load_ramdisk= option in the kernel still?
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I've come to the conclusion that in order to stay backwards
> compatible while moving root-mounting stuff to userspace, in the
> initial patch everything in prepare_namespace() and south needs to be
> fully supported in userspace.  This looks perfectly doable, but is a
> fair bit of work.
> 
> The one piece of ugliness I've encountered has to do with the
> load_ramdisk= option; this causes a ramdisk to be loaded from an
> external device, usually a floppy.  The ugliness has to do with the
> fact that it requires the kernel itself to deduce the size of the
> ramdisk, which is filesystem-specific.  Although this code is
> currently run for initrds as well, it doesn't need to, since the
> kernel knows the size of an initrd.
> 
> This code isn't complex by any means, but it's ugly and complex, and
> I'm trying to make something a bit cleaner than just copying the
> existing in-kernel code to userspace.
> 
> So, in short:
> 
> a) Does anyone use the load_ramdisk= option anymore, or is it
> legitimate to drop?
> 
I know Slackware Linux uses load_ramdisk= when you use floppies to start 
the install in the situations where booting from CD for some reason 
doesn't work. Slackware uses one boot disk and then 2 root disks in this 
case.


--
Jesper Juhl

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