Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Well, this is probably true in more sane cases, but when using embedded ramdisk image (available for both mips and ppc I believe), the 4Mb u-boot limit can indeed cause problems.
No, it CANNOT.
Yes it CAN.
I repeat: U-Boot does NOT uncompress the ramdisk. It just passes information about the ramdisk as is (i. e. compressed) to the Linux kernel. It is the Linux kernel which uncompresses the ramdisk if necessary.
The "embedded ramdisk image" option causes the ramdisk.gz (objcopied to ramdisk.o) to be linked into vmlinux. When using a 16Mb filesystem, if even somewhat filled, the likelihood of the image size growing beyond 4Mb is quite large.
Yes, this is actually a braindead enough solution that the ramdisk is compressed _twice_, but on the mips (2.4 series Linux), embedded ramdisk has been so widely used that noone seems to have noticed that regular initrd support is broken. This is fixed for 2.6 though.
/ Leif