Thread: What's the reason for 2-step boot process (init/rootfs)
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fanoush is offline fanoush
2008-09-21 , 18:22
Posts: 2,152 | Thanked: 1,490 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ Czech Republic
#5
Good questions :-)
Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post
1.) Why is the boot process the way it is? Is it safer this way? Is it because of legal problems with closed components?
It is safer this way because initfs is not used for writing so less things can go wrong with it. Rootfs can become corrupted or full. Current initfs also contain some factory hardware self testing stuff and is small so it is faster to flash/boot and test the hardware.
Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post
2.) What's the advantage of changing it? Will it be faster? Will there be things you can do that you cannot do now?
initfs is compiled with uclibc tooolchain for space reasons so it is slightly more complicated for development (two versions of libc and gcc and busybox - more possibilities of bugs, more testing needed). Also it proved itself to be more cumbersome for SSU and is harder to resize when space gets tight in it.

I guess the reason for change is that OMAP3 boot ROM (directly on the chip) has 'unbrickable' design and can load main bootloader straight from nand,usb,serial and mmc so some reasons for having initfs partition are gone.
As for faster boot - well, it may be slightly faster but not significantly.
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Last edited by fanoush; 2008-09-21 at 18:37.