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From: James A Sutherland <james@sutherland.net>
To: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 11:16:05 +0000
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On Tuesday 18 December 2001 8:55 am, Alexander Viro wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, James A Sutherland wrote:
> > Not necessarily. You could, say, put the modules in a small filesystem
> > image - say, Minix, or maybe ext2. Then just have the loader put that
> > disk image into RAM, and have the kernel able to read disk images from
> > RAM initially.
> >
> > Of course, this revolutionary new features needs a name. Something like
> > initrd, perhaps?
>
> Had you actually looked at initrd-related code?  I had and "bloody mess"
> is the kindest description I've been able to come up with.  Even after
> cleanups and boy, were they painful...

With a choice between that, or teaching lilo, grub etc how to link modules - 
and how to read NTFS and XFS, and losing the ability to boot from fat, minix 
etc floppies, tftp or nfs servers - almost any level of existing nastiness 
would be preferable to that sort of insane codebloat!


James.
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