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Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 04:26:31 -0500
From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>
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To: Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
CC: andersen@codepoet.org, Dave Cinege <dcinege@psychosis.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Abbott and Costello meet Crunch Time -- Penultimate 2.5 merge
 candidate list.
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Miles Bader wrote:

>Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com> writes:
>  
>
>>>[Well, OK, actually it'd be nice to have something like initramfs + some
>>>other sort of fetch-the-bits-directly-from-ROM FS which I could
>>>mix-n-match; anyway initramfs has got to be better than initrd...]
>>>      
>>>
>>It should be pretty easy to populate initramfs from ROM...
>>    
>>
>
>Actually what I was trying to say was that often I don't want to copy
>from ROM to RAM, I just want to have file reads get the bits directly
>from ROM (to avoid using, um, RAM).
>  
>

Yep, that was my assumption.

If your ROM is directly addressable, i.e. not read over a single-bit bus 
or anything, it should be doable.  I'm not saying that initramfs will do 
this out of the box :) but going from initramfs to "initromfs" should 
not be a huge leap...

However, that said, things also depend on what proggies you are running 
in your initramfs.  You may be running code that only runs at startup 
when the kernel boots, in which case the best space utilization would be 
to uncompress a compressed image out of ROM to RAM, use it to bootstrap, 
and then free [unlink] all the initramfs files that are no longer needed.

    Jeff




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