xeno74 wrote: Wed Jun 09, 2021 2:06 pm
No, I haven't noticed it till now. I create the initial ramdisk on ubuntu MATE 16.04.7. They work with all Linux distributions on my X1000 and X5000.
I've mostly used Ubuntu 12.04 standard and they've booted fine when I tested.
All initial ramdisks for the X5000 have a size of 9.8MB and for the X1000 from 10.9MB till 10.5MB and I don't have any issues with these.
Is that raw or GZipped?
diff
With a GUI?
Yeah it''s bit low level. I need something more upstream. That can compare folders and file sizes. Maybe I'm thinking of CompareFiles.
You're right. I created an initial ramdisk with the stable longterm kernel 5.10.39 on Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS today. It has a size of 2.7MB. Unfortunately I can't boot Fienix with this initial ramdisk.
Thanks for confirming. I wonder if this is because Fienix uses systemd? I ran into this with my boot manager. Systemd support old init scripts but I couldn't get it to work. I needed it to set up the x1boot mount. It work one time then stopped a few times then came back. Too unreliable so I scrapped and found after an hour of reading that systemd is way easy to setup a boot mount with. Where as with init it's hours reading a broad subject for one specific thing you need.
I tested 5.13 booting with a ramdisk created from Ubuntu 12.04 that uses init and here it worked.
I tried to reduce the initial ramdisk on ubuntu MATE 16.04.7 but without any success. I stripped the kernel modules and I deleted some modules but the size is always around 11MB. Does CFE supports other compressions?
From what I know it only supports GZip. Kinda like UBoot or the old one. For this reason I added internal XZ support to my boot loader. This way I can add in the latest best codec without relying on firmware. I don't even know if OF or CFE supports unpacking but in a binary I see no way of calling back to CFE as it's all OF interfaces. The large files are too big for my loader because it uses AmigaBoot to load them in. Like on the XE, CFE has a limit of around 14MB to load in files. Which is why the raw kernels cannot load from FFS with boot command. CFE can load a zImage from FFS OTOH. Below listing is XZ compressed kernels and ramdisks. Bigger ramdisks are off Fienix.
Directly from CFE, apart from FFS, big files are fine loading from FAT. They are also loaded directly in ram. So don't need to allocate memory. Aside from any internal allocating. Which is limited from FFS.
Edit:
Hooray for InterWeb! A power outage caused a system reboot. Thought I had lost half an hour of typing but it saved it! Phew. Quick press send!
