karl@decwrl.dec.com (Karl Rowley) (11/10/88)
ST Minix is a pretty impressive piece of work, and it works well with the Atari hard disk. For those who have 1 megabyte of memory and a hard disk, there do appear to be some drawbacks to the system as it is distributed. In order to load the root filesystem from the hard disk, you must have a fairly small partition dedicated to it. Another partition is required if you want to keep /usr on the hard disk. Since the Atari software only supports four hard disk partitions, this leaves a maximum of two partitions for other purposes. The hard disk is probably fast enough to make the ramdisk unnecessary in some situations. At boot time it would be nice to be able to simply mount the root filesystem from one partition on the hard disk, and forget about the ramdisk completely. Of course, one could use a ramdisk that was only large enough to hold the necessary files for getting the system started. However, the ramdisk would still be mounted on / and the hard disk would still have to be mounted on some subdirectory to /. In this situation /tmp and /usr could not both be on one hard disk partition. What would have to be changed to eliminate use of the ramdisk? Does such a change require recompiling the kernel? Karl Rowley Evans and Sutherland Computer Division Mountain View, California ...!decwrl!escd!karl escd!karl@decwrl.dec.com
dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan) (11/11/88)
In article <5269@louie.udel.EDU>, escd!es66!karl@decwrl.dec.com (Karl Rowley) writes: > > The hard disk is probably fast enough to make the ramdisk unnecessary in > some situations. At boot time it would be nice to be able to simply > mount the root filesystem from one partition on the hard disk, and forget > about the ramdisk completely. > > What would have to be changed to eliminate use of the ramdisk? Does such > a change require recompiling the kernel? > > Karl Rowley I've done this for the IBM-PC version, for two reasons; i/ I want to run tasks in the background, which you can't really do, when ~240K is missing, and ii/ I was sick of running out of space in /tmp. The changes I made, were relatively simple. There are two variations on this theme. One uses the /dev/ram purely for /tmp, which speeds up compiles, and alleviates the 'no space' issue somewhat, but it still takes up precious PC memory. What I did is remove all traces of the RAMDISK, from the kernel (yes, it has to be recompiled). I don't have the information with me, but I had to edit files in fs, mm, and of course, kernel. Be careful when doing this, because I managed to reinitialize my hard disk in the process. Personally, I think that there is probably enough interest to warrant using #ifdefs in the code. If there's enough interest, I'll post the diffs. - Der -- dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Dermot Tynan @ Tynan Computers) {mips,pyramid}!sultra!dtynan --- God invented alcohol to keep the Irish from taking over the planet ---
V050KY8G@ubvmsc.cc.buffalo.edu (11/11/88)
The message written to the newsgroup concerned having the root of the file system be a hard disk partition on MINIX-ST. Although I work with PC AT MINIX, I assume it is sufficiently similar enough to make an intelligent comment. For my system, I changed the #define's for BOOT_DEV and ROOT_DEV and recompiled. Actually, what happens in my system, as set up now, is the RAMdisk is somewhat unnecessarily loaded from a hard disk partition, then wiped out with mkfs, then mounted on /tmp. The root of the file system is another hard disk partition, and is so declared at load/boot time by ROOT_DEV being "compiled in." Seems to me that perhaps a more elegant solution would be to use chroot() to move the root file system to a hard disk partition, perhaps after it is mounted (could it be done something like chroot to /hd-mnt-dir/dev/hd0 ??). Has anyone else implemented using the RAMdisk as mounted on /tmp ?????
beattie@visenix.UUCP (Brian Beattie) (11/12/88)
In article <2637@sultra.UUCP> dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan) writes: ^In article <5269@louie.udel.EDU>, escd!es66!karl@decwrl.dec.com (Karl Rowley) writes: ^> ^> The hard disk is probably fast enough to make the ramdisk unnecessary in [text deleted] ^> Karl Rowley ^ ^I've done this for the IBM-PC version, for two reasons; i/ I want to run [ text deleted ] ^I did is remove all traces of the RAMDISK, from the kernel (yes, it has to ^be recompiled). I don't have the information with me, but I had to edit ^files in fs, mm, and of course, kernel. I did a similar thing. If ROOT_DEV has a major device of 3 (wini) I do not create a ramdisk and skip the copy of BOOT_DEV to ROOT_DEV. The changes were limited to fs/main.c. ^ Personally, I think ^that there is probably enough interest to warrant using #ifdefs in the code. ^If there's enough interest, I'll post the diffs. ^ - Der likewise when things settle down here. ^-- ^ dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Dermot Tynan @ Tynan Computers) ^ {mips,pyramid}!sultra!dtynan ^ -- _ANYONE_ | Brian Beattie (703)471-7552 can sell software| 11525 Hickory Cluster, Reston, VA. 22090 that has already | beattie@visenix.UU.NET been written | ...uunet!visenix!beattie