It's still pre-release, but I've titled it 1.3.3 since the
diffs are keyed to Linux 1.3.3 :)
Basically, this ramdisk makes many, many new ramdisks available
(all at the same time), and can also load gzipped rootdisks (allowing
*much* larger rootdisks to be put on a 1.44 MB floppies). Standard disk
images can be compressed using stock gzip -9 and placed on a floppy, and
the driver (assuming a large enough size setting) will decompress and
start the ramdisk...
The other part of the driver uses a very experimental
buffer-cache scheme. It uses buffer cache as the ramdisk. The problem
with this is that the buffers have a tendancy to get freed, and I've
tried to patch buffer.c to not free them. The nice thing about them is,
when they completely work (they might actually work now - I'm holding my
fingers crossed) they will dynamically allocate new ramdisks of various
size, and it'll make it easier to make the compressed ramdisk images :)
(yes, the buffer.c patches are kludges. I'll try to think up of
a better scheme for the next release!)
The diff files are included in the package, which is designed to
be untarred into the drivers/block subdirectory.
Bug reports, success reports, questions and even (informative) flames
are welcome!
- Chad