Ramdisk support

Aditya Godbole aag.lists at gmail.com
Thu Nov 16 16:36:45 UTC 2006


On 11/16/06, Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> wrote:
>
> I see.  Is it PXE-compliant?  If so, you can use FreeBSD's
> PXE bootloader (/boot/pxeboot) for loading the kernel.  In
> that case you can also load the root FS image as a separate
> file, so there is no need to hack it into the kernel binary.
>

u-boot is not PXE compliant. I have never come across anyone trying to
use it to boot FreeBSD before. Unfortunately, that is the only
bootloader that I know of that works on the architecture I'm working
on.

> As far as I know, there is no official support for loading
> a FreeBSD kernel directly, without using the FreeBSD boot
> loader.
>

Yes. However for putting FreeBSD on embedded systems, I have to make
tweaks to allow it to boot using other bootloaders. I'm working on
putting FreeBSD on the MPC8555 e500-PPC based board, which is not
supported at all.

> By the way, why don't you simply mount the root FS via NFS?
> Is the NIC not supported?  What NIC is it?
>

Quite a bit of the hardware is not supported in FreeBSD right now.
Probably this discussion should go on the embedded mailing list, but I
thought I would get a better response here for my original specific
question. (Can't say I was wrong).

Cheers.
--
aditya


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