Well my initial testing didn't work out to well. I attempted to run a batch file. But CFE just kept giving me errors. About "-z" being an invalid switch. It was hard to tell if it was my script or if it was CFE FAT corruption. I wonder if using a raw partition would be better. I gave up on that and then wasted half an hour booting the kernel from USB. Mostly because I forgot to set bootargs or something. And CFE actually loads slowly off USB. I wonder if it's related to UBoot and uses a slow 1.x mode. But I noticed that it's rather slower when unpacking on the fly.
Also I found the kernel couldn't unpack the ramdisk which is unusual. I'm used to the kernel being able to ungz, unlz or even unxz a ramdisk in the best case. PPC Linux used to use LZ for the ramdisk a lot. XZ has the best compression I've seen but is the slowest to compress. Given CFE is slowed down by a GZ it would be beneficial to have kernel support for this where it can unpack a ramdisk faster. It was taking so long I thought CFE had silently crashed.
Anyway this is my batch file. See anything wrong with it? It doesn't work for me!
Code: Select all
setenv bootargs "root=/dev/ram boot=casper single"
ramdisk -z -addr=0x24000000 -fatfs usbdisk0:initrd.gz
boot -z -elf -noints -fatfs usbdisk0:zimage-5.6