Re: [leaf-devel] 2.6.x kernel support?

[<E.S...@in...>]

Hello Mike, Charles,

Still only have webmail, so I hope it will show up on the list

> This feature might be useful in making a very small initial ramdisk image
>  for leaf that 'bootstrapped' the full LEAF system, and would not require
> a C library of it's own (instead using klibc and essentailly making direct
>  kernel calls).  You'll never be able to run bind or sendmail this way,
> but being able to run a simple shell (or other script processor like
> forth, lua, etc.) and do things like extract tar files to build a root
> filesystem image would be all we'd need.
>
This is what I mean with redundant, you would need a shell (and other
programs) in the initramfs (pre-init) and in userspace which isn't the
same one. So you need the space for a klibc compiled shell in the
initramfs and an other (uClibc/glibc) compiled shell in root.lrp (or so),
while currently we use one shell which is both used for pre-init (linuxrc)
and userspace.
It isn't possible to use the klibc initramfs programs in userspace
(AFAIK), which would be pointless anyway because the klibc versions
are/should be very limited in functionality/size.

For Mike: There are ofcourse images of ~1.5 Mb which contain an initramfs
and 2.6 kernel, but they don't contain all the programs we have in such an
image ;)

But I agree, the initramfs approach would make a technical cleaner
implementation. But it also means (because of redundancy and a bigger
kernel (2.6)) a bigger base image. I also don't see a lot of real
advantages for our case yet.

Eric Spakman