Saturday, June 30, 2007

T5, TX release and my ramdisk

Releases

Because of lack of up to date releases, I decided some time ago to put together something, so even normal users can test latest kernel and rootfs images. I made modular ramdisk (I'll tell you more about it in next section) and I was thinking about how to put release together. I've decided to try squashfs-lzma. I think that it could be useful once somebody figures out how to store rootfs in NAND memory. Because UnionFS was somehow broken in kernel at that moment, I patched kernel with aufs patch and repaired some trivial errors in it. So my releases are using squashfs-lzma and aufs. I didn't compile it all by myself, but I used z72kas root filesystem and just converted it into squasfs-lzma. I prepared TX kernel and modules and in cooperation with snua12, we put together kernel and modules for T5. If you are interested, you can get it on on my web. Main advantage is that in never releases, you can update just kernel or just rootfilesystem and you don§t need to overwrite everything you had ;-)

Initramdisk

What is new in my initramdisk? Why did I need something special? As I already said before, I wanted to try squashfs-lzma. So I needed support for mounting aufs. Also I wanted /home to be in separate file so I wouldn't lost all my data when I use different rootfs. So I needed ramdisk with possibility to mount several different files and I wanted ramdisk, which can be easily configurable by using external text file stored on SD/MMC card. So I wrote it up. I also prepared some user-definable functions which are called during boot process, so you can use them, if you are missing something ;-) I've got good experience with them. I've downloaded some image some time ago and I couldn't boot it. But I was able to find out why and even repair it by using just text editor in PalmOS and user-definable functions in my ramdisk. So it's very useful ;-) If you are interested, you can get it on on my web. You can also find there well documented example of configuration.

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