Subject: Initrd stuff...

From: Alex deVries <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 May 1998 23:56:47 -0400 (EDT)

Okay, I'm hacking the kernel to allow for initial ramdisks.

The approach I'm taking (after discussion with Ralf) is to use
prom_open/read/close() to read an ramdisk file, instead of taking the
ramdisk off of the tail portion of the boot image.

So, I'm doing work in linux/arch/mips/sgi/prom/ .  I'm trying to do a:

prom_open(filename,rdonly,&fd);

But, I always get back PROM_ENODEV .  I assume that means that the device
I'm trying to locate doesn't work.

I've tried all sorts of things, apparantly none are correct.  I thought
that "scsi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(8)/initrd" was my best chance, but
it comes back with PROM_ENODEV also.

Anyone know what the correct syntax is?

- Alex

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From: Oliver Frommel <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 12:33:36 +0200 (MET DST)

> it comes back with PROM_ENODEV also.

did you try "dksc(0,1,8)initrd", too? that's what i use to boot sashARCS and fx
from a certain partition at least ("PROM syntax" vs. your "ARCS syntax" afaik).
(0 being the controller, 1 the drive number and 8 the partition) 

anyway "scsi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(8)" won't work, because you have 
specified a disk and rdisk. shouldn't this read "scsi(0)disk(1)partition(8)"?

-oliver

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From: Ulf Carlsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 11:54:34 +0200 (CEST)

I know that this bug is reported, but it's quite annoying (it makes my
Indy R4000 useless).

I'm now trying to boot 2.1.99.

...
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernes memory: 32k freed
Warning: unable to open an initial console.
Got vced at 88018c54.
Kernel panic: Caught VCE exception - should not happen

*sigh*

- Ulf

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 13:02:08 +0200

> Kernel panic: Caught VCE exception - should not happen

I'm working on a clean solution for the problem which is matching the
virtual and physical colour of pages.  Implementing this is nontrivial
due to the buddy algorithem which Linux uses to maintain it's free
page pool.  I have some solution using DaveM's first approach to the
virtual aliasing problem (it hits Sparcs, too) but that one proofed to
be problematic because it needs to allocate multiple adjacent pages.
In the Ultra case it's just two pages but for R4x00SC/MC it's eigth
pages which essentially turns the machine into a swapping something,
so something smarter is needed unless you have infinite amounts of
RAM ...

  Ralf