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Sortix 0.9
https://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=28883		 Page 2 of 2
Author:  sortie [ Mon Jan 05, 2015 6:15 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Sortix 0.9
KemyLand wrote:
Just don't do what Linux does (decompress itself with a stub :roll: ). That would make debugging impossible, and would require a lot of black magic and games with the ELF format.

I believe it would be better if the bootloader did the decompression. This is a nice separation of duties.
KemyLand wrote:
Personally, (although you didn't said anything about it) I prefer to have only drivers and executables on the ramdisk, and assets and that kind of stuff somewhere in a ext* filesystem 8)

I actually prefer to not take a stance on this. The ramdisk contains an initial filesystem. It can be as minimal as it wants: It could just contain an init and ext2 driver, which is used to locate and mount the real root filesystem. Or, it can be a fully fledged environment as in Sortix 0.9. The kernel doesn't and shouldn't care.
Author:  KemyLand [ Mon Jan 05, 2015 6:42 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Sortix 0.9
sortie wrote:
KemyLand wrote:
Personally, (although you didn't said anything about it) I prefer to have only drivers and executables on the ramdisk, and assets and that kind of stuff somewhere in a ext* filesystem 8)

I actually prefer to not take a stance on this. The ramdisk contains an initial filesystem. It can be as minimal as it wants: It could just contain an init and ext2 driver, which is used to locate and mount the real root filesystem. Or, it can be a fully fledged environment as in Sortix 0.9. The kernel doesn't and shouldn't care.

Any rational kernel won't care about these things. Anyway, a big RD is just not my model 8) .
Author:  sortie [ Mon Jan 05, 2015 7:06 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Sortix 0.9
Do note that I don't expect actual Sortix installations that use permanent root filesystems to have large ramdisk. My few such installations use a minimal ramdisk containing an init, mbr and ext2 drivers, and configuration that tells init to look for a partition containing an ext2 filesystem with the desired UUID, which is to be mounted and chroot'd into, and the next init be run. Such a ramdisk is at most a megabyte.

The key point here is that the ramdisk can be any size and used for any purpose. The ramdisk environment is not a second class citizen, it's an actual fully fledged instance of my operating system.

In happier news, I've discovered the xzio GRUB module. I can use this to transparently decompress the kernel and initrd upon boot. With fast multithreaded xz compression and high compression ratios, I think that's a pretty good trade-off, for a bit higher boot times and that users don't have to decompress iso files themselves.
Author:  BrightLight [ Thu Jan 08, 2015 3:21 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Sortix 0.9
Wow! Great work Sortie! Now I'm jealous.. Only kidding! :D
Keep it up!
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