From: Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>
To: Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net>
Cc: The Unix Heritage Society <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Pre-init initialization
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2019 09:04:36 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAC20D2PjoKqSfEeBu9pJuOOR772hDhwmUh_k0TbYZU-WTnHSNA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7236c9d4-40af-bc49-8aee-5c32d869d2eb@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
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A couple of the commercial systems did this for sure. Linux definitely
picked it up from UNIX practices, although I have no idea/memory of who did
it first. We used the idea at Stellar (Stellix) and at Masscomp (RTU).
IIRC, a couple of others like Pyramid made have created a RAMFS - but it
was kicking around the UNIX community for a fairly long time - certainly in
the late 1970s - *i.e.* post V7.
FWIW: V7 had /stand which was a funky UNIX-like standalone system that some
applications could be compiled. The problem was that it was a little
different so you would end up seeing #ifdef STAND in code for things like
fsck, fsdb, even cat. At Masscomp we ended up with three target
environments for a couple of the system maintenance utilities: the OS,
/stand and the boot ROMS. This was expensive/a PITA to maintain and keep
straight, and in the case of the boot ROM, space was a huge problem.
The RAMFS idea was created to get rid of at least /stand and IIRC we were
able to drop a number of utilities out of the boot ROM. I'm not sure how
far they took it. I left for Stellar and it was always the way Stellix
booted.
On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 7:47 PM Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:
> Do, or did, anything other than Linux use a concept of an initramfs /
> initrd to create a pre-(main)-init initialization environment to prepare
> the system to execute the (main)-init process?
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-08-07 13:05 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-08-06 23:46 Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-08-07 1:22 ` Andrew Warkentin
2019-08-07 13:04 ` Clem Cole [this message]
2019-08-07 16:40 ` Warner Losh
2019-08-08 13:31 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-08-09 1:52 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-08-10 0:23 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-08-10 2:28 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-08-10 4:21 ` Kevin Bowling
2019-08-10 4:50 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-08-10 4:52 ` Adam Thornton
2019-08-08 13:43 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-08 18:59 ` Warner Losh
2019-08-09 1:46 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-08-09 2:15 ` Warner Losh
2019-08-09 6:43 ` Kevin Bowling
2019-08-10 1:45 ` Chris Hanson
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