THE GOAL I need custom Linux system that will boot either from a small IDE hard disk, CDROM drive or using BOOTP from the network. The file system must be loaded into RAM disk of size 16 Megs, and as a structure it will be much like what we have on a normal, disk-based Linux system. Targeted hardware is Pentium, 200 MHz, 128 Mb RAM THE EFFORT So, I took color.gz (the so called ?root disk' in the installation set for Slackware 7.1) as a starting point of my efforts to produce an image of desired File System:
gzip ?v9 color.gz mount ?o loop color /temp01
then I create a targeted file system: dd if=/dev/zero of=RootSystem bs=1k count=16384 mke2fs ?m 0 ?N 2100 RootSystem mount ?o loop RootSystem /temp02
File system is created by hand in /temp02 and files are copied over from /temp01 to /temp02; except for device files in /dev ? they are copied from /temp01 like this:
cp ?dpR /temp01/ra* /temp02/dev/ cp ?dpR /temp01/tt* /temp02/dev/ cp ?dpR /temp01/null /temp02/dev/ cp ?dpR /temp01/console /temp02/dev/
(or even created on spot using mknod) and so on ? I change /temp02/etc/fstab to have:
/dev/ram0 / ext2 defaults 1 1 none /proc proc defaults 0 0
I keep on customizing my /temp02 file system, using most of the stuff from /temp01, and adding other things ? to extend of ~4Megs; after all, presumably I have 16Megs ?disk' space! Next is: ?umount RootSystem' and ?dd if= RootSystem bs=1k | gzip ?v9 >
RootSystem.gz'
Then I compile new kernel with option size for RAMDISK=16384 (on ?make xconfig', I find ?Block devices')? as a product I have ?bz16megsRamKernel'
As a testing bed for this ram-disk based system I use a small DOS partition, equipped with loadlin.exe to load my kernel and compressed image of root system like this:
loadlin.exe bz16megsRamKernel initrd=RootSystem.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw
THE PROBLEM when this system boots, I can see that df reports RAM disk with total size of some 3897 blocks, even though the kernel specified 16Megs (in a brief moment at boot time I saw Ramdisk driver initializing 16 disks of 16384 M size)
The same happens when loadlin.exe bz16megsRamKernel initrd=color.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw
THE QUESTION What is inside color.gz file system that over-writes the RAM disk size word in the Kernel? How can I change it to recognize the settings of the kernel?