Maragda: Running Linux from CD

There are three things to do:

All the necessary pieces that do the work (mainly shell scripts) are arranged into two working directories:

I should mention that, perhaps, some device files (files under /dev) might not be correct due to the copy from an ext2 file system to a CD file system (iso9660). In this case, you should replace those files by the corresponding /dev files from your system.

Now, let's outline the relevant steps in the building process and describe the purpose of each shell script as well as the main configuration files. Minor details are left out of the explanation; if you decide to build your own Maragda-like system, you should consult doc/developer.html on the CD and carefully read each shell script on the working directories.

Figure 1 shows the main steps to be taken in the boot process.

Figure 1. Main Steps of Boot Process

The target here is to create a bootable floppy disk that will be merged into the CD to make it bootable.

The boot loader for setting up the floppy is syslinux. It can boot a Linux system from a DOS-formatted floppy containing a kernel and an initial RAM disk file (compressed) with the root file system inside.

So, we'll need a kernel along with its loadable modules. (Only the kernel is required now.) I will not explain here how to compile a kernel but will only remark that it should support

(You can find my kernel configuration on doc/developer.html.)

Now we have to build the initial RAM disk (initrd) holding the root file system for the first-stage boot. The easiest way to obtain one is to borrow it from a floppy rescue disk. But, I follow the “do it yourself” philosophy. The directory boot/initrd is a skeleton of the contents of my RAM disk. The script named Init_initrd fills that directory from scratch, copying files from the source installation. It creates directories, copies a subset of dev-files onto initrd/dev and populates initrd/bin. The size of an initrd must be kept small, so you should leave only the essential binaries on initrd/bin. Then you must run Cp_lib; it will copy the libraries on initrd/lib for the binaries you left before.

When you are finished, run Make_initrd_fs_gz. It will create a file (Minix formated), copying to it the files on boot/initrd and then compress it.

Now you have a kernel and an initial RAM disk. Next, you should generate the bootable floppy with syslinux. The syslinux configuration file, SYSLINUX.CFG, is contained in boot/syslinux_boot_floppy-20MB. The line:

append initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=20480 vga=0x315

instructs the boot loader to load the initial RAM disk file on the floppy and passes two parameters to the kernel to inform it of the size of the RAM disk and the framebuffer video mode. The RAM disk size should be customized to the size of the ROOT.FS used.

Finally, the bootable floppy is created by the Write_syslinux_boot_floppy script. It will also extract a raw image of the floppy to be merged onto the CD.

The most relevant file here is boot/initrd/linuxrc (/linuxrc on the initial RAM disk) because this script is executed at boot up. It performs the main tasks intended for this stage:

/MARAGDA
/system/ROOT.FS
/system/WHOLE.FS

mount -n /proc /proc -t proc
echo 0x101 > /proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev
(0x101 represents /dev/ram1)

If everything goes okay, the boot process will continue by executing init, already in the new root file system. The old file system (initrd) will remain mounted under /initrd on the new one.