Re: [rtl] RTL in ROM

[Gilles <gilles@birdland.com>]

Thank you all for your answers, mostly the type of answer I had though
was regarding the use of some external hardware that ALREADY fakes a IDE
disk and not to change any software at all. That certainly takes care of
the "ROMing" doesn't it.

Well, that was the other option but we are designing our own PCI adapter
with its own add-on BIOS (which is inevitable in our case as we have a
little LCD display that we'd like to initialize as soon as possible to
get the user to wait while the monster boots ;-)) + Flash and a couple
of other freebees. It would seem logical to cut the cost down and use
that card as the "boot disk" as well. Of course, the cost is the
software we have to hack.

To make a BIOS that takes over as a loader + decompacter of the Linux
image into RAM really is not a lot of work but to make a fake file
system so that we can mount some external ROM space as a root disk is
what scares me as I am not familiar with that code at all yet... and in
the mean time I have the hardware to build anyway ;-( 

Still you are right. It would be wise for me to investigate the extent
of that "file system" work BEFORE I go ahead and load the adapter with a
lot of flash.

If you have any pointers to HOWTO implement a file systems, I'd love to
read them. It would seem as Linux as many many file system drivers
(DOSFat, NT, OS/2, Netware, NFS, etc..) so surely that must be feasable.

Thanks for the input,

Gilles Gameiro.
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