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Re: [Xen-users] booting domU with multiple concatenated ramdisks?

To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] booting domU with multiple concatenated ramdisks?
From: Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 11:56:30 +0100
Cc: wferi@xxxxxxx
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> Some bootloaders (eg. syslinux) have to ability to load multiple
> ramdisks, effectively concatenating them.  This makes it very easy
> to augment ramdisks, like eg. customizing an installer.  Can I do
> something similar with XEN?  Separating the ramdisk cpio arhives with
> commas in the config file didn't work...

I don't think this is currently possible.  There was some work done by a 
developer in adding the ability to load multiple modules with the domain 
builder (for supporting GNU HURD) but I don't know what happened to it.  I 
don't *think* it was actually checked in.

What do you actually require here?  Do you *literally* just need concatenation 
of the ramdisks in memory?  Some metadata too?  It's probably not very hard 
to hack pygrub to build a compound "ramdisk" image containing the 
concatenated contents of multiple files (possibly with some other goop in 
there) in a file, then pass *that* to the domain builder.  It would be harder 
to modify the domain builder itself to load multiple files directly.

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~maw48/pmpu/)

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