Subject: initrd is working and new test image

From: Thomas Bogendoerfer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 13:19:44 +0100

Hi,

since there are still some people out there, who have problems with
Linux/MIPS on their Indys, I was looking for way to rule out more
setup problems. One way is to get initrd working for Linux/MIPS,
so setting up the nfs root directory won't be necessary anymore.
I hope Puffin will get some time to get us a more decent RedHat
installer.

To build a kernel with an initrd, you need configure initrd into your
kernel, then make boot (right now it works only with ecoff kernels) 
and use arch/mips/boot/addinitrd to combine vmlinux.ecoff with your initrd.

For now, I've built a new kernel with an attached initrd. This initrd
contains a shell (ash) and some utilities (ls, mount, etc.) plus the
needed shared libraries. When you boot this kernel, you should see
the message will "Welcome to Linux/MIPS" and should be dropped into a single 
user shell.

So people with the problem seeing only "Freeing unused kernel memory",
please try it, and report your experiences.

I hope to get the kernel uploaded before monday (depends how crappy the line
to ftp.linux.sgi.com this time is). You can find it

ftp://ftp.linux.sgi.com/pub/linux/mips/test/vmlinux-indy-initrd-990313.gz

Thomas.

-- 
   This device has completely bogus header. Compaq scores again :-|
It's a host bridge, but it should be called ghost bridge instead ;^)
                                        [Martin `MJ' Mares on linux-kernel]

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From: Tom Woelfel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 12:59:52 +0100

Hi,

 > please try it, and report your experiences.

Yesss, this works. After netbooting I find myself in the shell. The
included prog's are working. Well, actually I've rearranded my desk a
little bit, and while 'the X-files' are running in the background I
played a little bit ;-)

I was furthermore able to create a directory (/mnt) and
(straightforward) I tried to mount the root-dir from the server. This
works too, but whith some error-messages (RPC sendmsg returned error
code 128). After setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH it was aslo possible to
execute /misc/installinit/init. The following mount-request for /proc
ended the program. 

Hope this helps,

Tom

---

From: Thomas Bogendoerfer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:52:39 +0100

On Tue, Mar 16, 1999 at 12:59:52PM +0100, Tom Woelfel wrote:
> included prog's are working.

that's great. Now I hope this will also work for the R4400 machines.

> code 128).

that's normal for a 2.2 kernel without running portmap. One workaround is
to use mount -o nolock, but I'm not sure, if this option is supported by
the mount on the initrd.

Thomas.