initrd is working and new test image

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]

Hi,

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

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

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.

   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]