[BusyBox] Question regarding Minix FS

Geoffrey Espin espin at idiom.com
Wed Feb 27 11:13:03 UTC 2002


Jeff,

> Our embedded system is getting a little tight on space, and we are
> currently using ext2 fs ramdisk, and r/w flash sector.  So I need fs
> creation tools and maintance tools, but no one at my site is familiar
> with the minix filesystem to know what we will be losing, or about any
> pitfalls, if we move from ext2 to minix -- due to the fact that minix
> tools are built into busybox.

I don't know if using minix fs is all that common these days.

I believe the most common strategy is to use cramfs with shmfs
(for writeable but temporary/volatile storage).  Then I added
JFFS2 support for the permanent storage.  On MIPS (which is much
bulkier than x86) I divide a 4MB flash into 2MB for boot+ramdisk,
then 2MB for JFFS2.

Basically, you build a cramfs ramdisk.o into vmlinux.  Then in
the /linuxrc startup file, you dynamically create a shmfs image
and copy cramfs into shmfs and do a pivot_root.  Then continue
with 'init' normally.

Look back in the archives (October '01?) for help from Erik on this.

Geoff
--
Geoffrey Espin
espin at idiom.com
--



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