Re: Can I run linux without a file system?

Dear Karl,

in message [off-list ref] you wrote:

My filesystem is 5.7 MB uncompressed.  And, for me
(sorry Wolfgang!) I think that *is* minimal.  Well,
not "minimal" in the sense of "as small as humanly
possible", but at least "miniature" -- compared to
more than 1000 MB for my desktop Linux host.  Our board
isn't big: it has 16 MB of flash & 64 MB of RAM,
can serve up telnet sessions & web pages, etc., and

Well, that's about what SELF contains -  which  takes  about  2.2  MB
uncompressed, 830 kB compressed.

*	One doesn't just make a zip or .tgz file; rather,
	one must must make a filesystem structure per se,
	that Linux on the PPC board can mount.

There are patches out there that can load a .tgz file into a  ramdisk
upon boot, so instead a ramdisk image you can load a tarball.

*	I could bulk-copy (cp -R) from $xroot to the
	filesystem image, *but* you can't cp around the
	files in /dev.  The script below is hackish

You can. RTFM. Pay attention to options like '-a' or '-R'.


Wolfgang Denk

--
Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-4596-87  Fax: (+49)-8142-4596-88  Email: wd@denx.de
"If you can, help others. If you can't, at least don't hurt  others."
- the Dalai Lama

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