Hi all,

u-boot-users-admin@lists.sourceforge.net wrote on :

In message 1120664027.6064.99.camel@daroca you wrote:

...

I am attempting to boot Linux on a target platform using a USB mass storage device (flash disk) to hold the kernel and the root filesystem.

I thought it may be a good idea to replicate the same steps used when booting from a tftp server, i.e. I copy the root filesystem (using an initrd image) to an address in RAM, then copy the kernel to a different address in RAM. Finally bootm with the start address of the kernel. Bootargs will be set during this process.

You can do it this way, but it is a waste of system RAM. Why don't you use a (read-only) file system mounted on the USB device?

I tried this with a read-only ext2 root file system on a linux partition on an USB memory stick some time ago - and failed. I hadn't much time to analyze what's going wrong but I think the problem was that the kernel (linuxppc_2_4_devel from denx) tried to mount the root file system _before_ initializing of the usb sub system has completed. At least the console messages looked so - but perhaps I missed something.

Has anybody else tried this? I would be happy to hear about a successful way to do this.

Regards, Martin