Subject: Re: Netpliance Iopener booted with NetBSD...
To: Ignatios Souvatzis <is@jocelyn.rhein.de>
From: David Brownlee <abs@netbsd.org>
List: port-i386
Date: 03/23/2000 20:55:06
On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
> > It also allows us to fit more userland onto the "system on a floppy" type of
> > setups (for simple routers, etc...).
>
> At least on i386, we do this already. That is, the boot loader gunzips the
> kernel (if it is gzipped), and the kernel inludes a memory disk image of the
> root partition. Is better than gzipping individual files, as it gzips the
> meta data, too.
However that costs us more RAM as we hold a complete copy of the
uncompressed ramdisk in memory. This bites on low memory machines
:/ Being able to COW share pages directly from a ramdisk would
solve that, but the gzipping individual files would probably be
an easier gain :)
David/absolute