> I do something very similar in my alpine linux distro. Instead of just > continuing in initramfs, the init script mounts a tmpfs, finds a base > installation (2-3MB) and "switch_root" to the tmpfs. From here it loads > a set of packages (from usb/cdrom/cf) and configuration (from > usb/floppy/cf). > > >From this base installation it is possible to mount disks, raid, iscsi, > lvm and fire up vserver guests. > Hi Natanael I have followed your posts in gentoo-embedded mailing list. I have only examined alpine-linux a little, but I'm not quite sure why you use the tmpfs rather than say keeping with the initramfs and perhaps using aufs to overwrite with additional packages, and perhaps even adding a writeable /etc directory? (Actually on the wrt linksys distros they often add a writable partition with symlinks into /etc, or vice-versa) Having only an initramfs seems like a very sensible solution for Michael? He could use a second partition for writable stuff and mount it rw - then simply symlink in anything required from the static partition to give a kind of updatable /etc/ (or whatever) I'm researching something similar myself, but in my case I want quite a lot of stuff in the base distro (30-60MB perhaps) and so your tmpfs approach seems like quite a waste when I only have 128 or 256MB or ram on the devices I want to use...? Anyone else got any other thoughts on this? Cheers Ed W