[U-Boot-Users] "Problem in increasing initrd(RAMDISK) size"

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Leif,

in message <42A6F777.20801 at i3micro.com> you wrote:
>
> Yes it CAN.

Ummm...

"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things,  because
that would also stop you from doing clever things."       - Doug Gwyn

> The "embedded ramdisk image" option causes the ramdisk.gz (objcopied to
> ramdisk.o) to be linked into vmlinux.
> When using a 16Mb filesystem, if even somewhat filled, the likelihood of
> the image size growing beyond 4Mb is quite large.

The fact that you can do such a thing does not mean  that  it'a  s  a
good  idea. I've never been a friend of the embedded ramdisk feature,
but my view is resource oriented and I just have to accept that  it's
a  cleaner  design  than to copy things that can be done in user land
into kernel code. But then  -  this  is  intended  to  bootstrap  the
system, and NOT to provide a root file system with application code.

You're almost certainly running a sub-optimal design if you're  using
a  ramdisk  anyway - ther eis neraly always much better solutions, no
matter if your optimization criteria are memory footprint, boot time,
or what.

> Yes, this is actually a braindead enough solution that the ramdisk is
> compressed _twice_, but on the mips (2.4 series Linux), embedded ramdisk
> has been so widely used that noone seems to have noticed that regular
> initrd support is broken. This is fixed for 2.6 though.

I don't know which kernel tree you are talking about. On the few MIPS
boards we support ramdisk support is working fine.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
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