Viable PPC platform?

[Eugene Surovegin]

On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 03:52:20PM -0700, Howard, Marc wrote:
> > 
> > In message <20060509171520.GA10886 at gate.ebshome.net> you wrote:
> > >
> > > After many years of doing embedded Linux stuff I still don't 
> > > understand why people are so fond of initrd.
> > > 
> > > For temporary stuff - tempfs is much better and flexible. For r/o 
> > > stuff - just make separate MTD partition (cramfs, squashfs) 
> > and mount 
> > > it directly as root. Both options will waste significantly less 
> > > memory.
> > 
> > Agreed.
> > 
> > And if somebody wants to see facts and numbers, please see
> > http://www.denx.de/wiki/view/DULG/RootFileSystemSelection
> > 
> 
> One size does not fit all.  We have an application with a very large
> file system.  It can't fit in the available flash, however we do have a
> ton of RAM (512MB).  NFS is not an option nor is it desirable (latency
> and availability issues).  Boot time is not an issue either in this case
> as it takes the equipment many minutes to calibrate and initialize.
> 
> initrd also solves another problem.  The combined uBoot multi-image
> although huge (>32 MB) represents a complete system firmware snapshot in
> a single (huge) file.  By selecting the appropriate uImage the host can
> guarantee the linux build, device drivers, application version and FPGA
> firmware revs (the embedded board is rebooted to guarantee a repeatable
> starting state).  This makes revision control for the overall system
> much easier, especially since the host system is running windoze.

This all is nice provided you use network for boot. IMHO this is quite 
_rare_ setup (especially Windows host!!!). For 99% of embedded designs 
this is obviously not a viable option.

-- 
Eugene