[PATCH] initrd specified via Yaboot prompt.

Paulo Ricardo Paz Vital vital at br.ibm.com
Sat Oct 6 02:43:17 EST 2007


Hello people,

An interesting feature requested by some Yaboot users I know was load a
different ramdisk (initrd) file rather than specified in the yaboot
configuration file. Sometime they tried to boot some kernel and initrd
and the last was not found by Yaboot. To solve the problem they had to
boot the machine with a rescue system and edit the yaboot.conf file with
the different initrd.

These patch provides the function of load a alternative initrd file
specified by the user via Yaboot prompt. To load the new file, just use
the "initrd=<name_of_file>" command. The <name_of_file> could include
all the directory path to the file.

Using only the "initrd" command, Yaboot will load the default kernel
specified in the configuration file and the initrd file specified by the
user. The user can, also, specify an initrd file to any other label of
the configuration file, just adding the "initrd" command before the
label's name.

Some exemples of usage:

Welcome to yaboot version 1.3.14
Enter "help" to get some basic usage information
boot: initrd=test.img
New initrd file specified: test.img
Please wait, loading kernel...
   Elf64 kernel loaded...
Loading ramdisk...

Welcome to yaboot version 1.3.14
Enter "help" to get some basic usage information
boot: 
* linux            teste                    
boot: teste initrd=test.img
New initrd file specified: test.img
Please wait, loading kernel...
   Elf64 kernel loaded...
Loading ramdisk...

I've extensively tested the patch on an IBM System p550 (POWER5+) LPAR
locally and via netboot.

thanks, Paulo Vital

-- 
Signed-off-by: Paulo Ricardo Paz Vital <vital at br.ibm.com>
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