Ramdisk support

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <200611161457.kAGEvp3F068251 at lurza.secnetix.de>
            Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> writes:
: Aditya Godbole wrote:
:  > Oliver Fromme wrote:
:  > > I don't know u-boot.  What is that?
:  > 
:  > u-boot is a bootloader popular in embedded systems.
:  > Its often used with Linux.
: 
: I see.  Is it PXE-compliant?  If so, you can use FreeBSD's
: PXE bootloader (/boot/pxeboot) for loading the kernel.  In
: that case you can also load the root FS image as a separate
: file, so there is no need to hack it into the kernel binary.
: 
: As far as I know, there is no official support for loading
: a FreeBSD kernel directly, without using the FreeBSD boot
: loader.
: 
: By the way, why don't you simply mount the root FS via NFS?
: Is the NIC not supported?  What NIC is it?

This sounds like it might be a port to a new platform.  I ran into
exactly this issue when porting FreeBSD/arm to the AT91Rm9200.  I
needed a ram disk to run out of because at the time I barely had
serial console support working, let alone network.  The boot loader I
had groked these things.  And pxe was nowhere to be found.

In time, I wrote a network driver, then an SD driver and someone else
wrote a the usb glue so I had a lot of choices, but in the early days,
all I could use was a ram disk...

Warner