> All you should need to do is to change the setup code to create a
> fake disk drive descriptor block if need be and unpack zImage from
> flash to RAM. Providing you say no to APM and PCI BIOS support no
> bios calls are made after the 16bit setup
I'm also interested in embedding Linux, for a project I'm currently working
on. I not only want to embed the kernel in ROM, but also the file system (NFS
isn't a sensible option for this).
What I'd like to do is use a reserved area of memory (e.g. 8-9Mb in an 8Mb RAM
machine) for a ROM filesystem, and provide a block device driver, probably
based very closely on the RAMdisk driver, to support it. A boot ROM would also
have to be put together to uncompress the kernel out of ROM in the first
place, as Alan suggested. A spare slot can usually be found in a network card
for one of the latter.
Has any work on such a ROMdisk, or on booting the kernel from ROM, been done?
Anyone who's interested in it, or has done anything towards either, please get in touch.
I'm temporarily off the mailing list, as it's the vacation and I don't have quite so many hours each day free to catch up with it, so replies to either mail address would be nice, please.