---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Zongwei Zhou Date: 11 April 2013 04:47 Subject: Ubuntu (USE_INITRD) on FastModels VE Cortex A15 RTSM

Dear Linaro maintainers,

My name is Zongwei Zhou. I am a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon. These days I came across one problem when booting Linaro Ubuntu on FastModels VE Cortex A15 RTSM. I would greatly appreciate it if you could offer some guidelines and suggestions. Thanks very much!

By following the guidelines in https://releases.linaro.org/13.02/ubuntu/vexpress "RTSM" tab, I have successfully booted Ubuntu. However, the booting process is quite slow in FastModels simulator. When looking at the booting log, I found out that it stuck quite a long time in loading file system from RTSM MMC. Thus I am looking for using initrd to speed up the booting process.

I downloaded the linaro boot-wrapper source code and found out that it supports USE_INITRD configuration. USE_INITRD allows me to combine the boot-wrapper, kernel image and filesystem.cpio.gz into a linux-system.axf. I did that, but it seems that the boot-wrapper runs correctly, but linux kernel later stuck in an infinite loop at address 0xC0253970, and even the FastModels terminal is not invoked. The kernel image I am using is the uImage from hwpack_linaro-vexpress_20130224-256_armhf_supported.tar.gz. The way I created the filesystem.cpio.gz is I decompressed the linaro-quantal-nano-20130224-286.tar.gz tar ball, and repacked it as compressed cpio archive using "find . | cpio --quiet -H newc -o | gzip -9 -n > filesystem.cpio.gz".

Could you please kindly give me some hints about booting Ubuntu with initrd? Or are there other alternatives that could speed up the booting process? I am trying the NFS boot now.

Thanks very much for your patience about this long email. Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Best wishes, Zongwei Zhou

-- Zongwei (Stephen) Zhou （周宗伟 in Chinese） Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Email: zongweiz@andrew.cmu.edu