[Arm-netbook] Disecting mmcblk0p1 and the boot process

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Frans Pop <elendil at planet.nl> wrote:
> As some of you may know, Luke sponsored my netbook on the basis that I'd
> try to get Debian Installer running on it. My confidence for being able to
> do that was based on Martin Michlmayr's excellent work getting D-I to run
> on various ARM-based NAS devices (one of which I own myself) and my own
> fairly deep knowledge of D-I.
>
> This netbook is quite challenging though.

 :)

 what would be i think absolutely fantastic would be something like
what i described in that cross-post on debian-boot, debian,
debian-live etc. which is this: a .tgz of a root filesystem which
contains _another_ tarball of a root filesystem (containing d-i),
which is unpacked into a ramdisk and then pivot_root'ed.

 so exactly the _reverse_ of initrd.

 tarball:
     /bin/nash
     /tarball_containing_d_i.tgz
     /init
     /create_ramdisk_unpack_d_i_tarball_do_pivotroot_umount_old_rootfs.sh

in this way, you'd be able to get into d-i and have the old filesystem
completely untouched, ready for running d-i.  icing on the cake would
have d-i search for ISO images on any sdcards.  the other challenge is
that it would need to be an fbdev-based d-i (gtk?) because of the lack
of tty consoles.

failing that: heck, if you can get tftpboot to work, _great_.

but - honestly, i think it's sensible to wait for a bit, see what
happens about asking for the linux kernel source code.

l.