Dear Leif,
in message 42A6F777.20801@i3micro.com you wrote:
Yes it CAN.
Ummm...
"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." - Doug Gwyn
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.
The fact that you can do such a thing does not mean that it'a s a good idea. I've never been a friend of the embedded ramdisk feature, but my view is resource oriented and I just have to accept that it's a cleaner design than to copy things that can be done in user land into kernel code. But then - this is intended to bootstrap the system, and NOT to provide a root file system with application code.
You're almost certainly running a sub-optimal design if you're using a ramdisk anyway - ther eis neraly always much better solutions, no matter if your optimization criteria are memory footprint, boot time, or what.
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.
I don't know which kernel tree you are talking about. On the few MIPS boards we support ramdisk support is working fine.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk