[ipxe-devel] Multiple initrd in UEFI

[Christian Nilsson]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2017, 12:04 Michael Brown, <mcb30 at ipxe.org> wrote:

> On 06/09/17 06:05, Christian Nilsson wrote:
> > What happens here is that you are booting a bzImage, the cpio handling
> > is only done when the bzImage type is booted and is not when the initrd
> > is loaded.
> > In EFI mode everything goes via the EFI image type instead, which has no
> > such handling.
> > (enabling bzImage support in EFI mode is not possible)
> >
> > I have requested support for this as well, but there are some issues
> > that as of yet does not have any clear solution.
> >
> > Maybe Michael can give us an update on this.
>
> My solution sketch for this is to have iPXE's virtual filesystem (the
> one exposed to the kernel via EFI_SIMPLE_FILE_SYSTEM_PROTOCOL) have the
> ability to provide CPIO-wrapped versions of any file.  The main
> outstanding question is just what naming scheme to use.  There are
> several options:
>
> - A virtual directory, allowing for e.g. initrd=cpio/test.sh
>
> - A hidden virtual directory, allowing for e.g. initrd=.cpio/test.sh
>
> - Magic extensions, allowing for e.g. initrd=test.sh.cpio
>
> Michael
>

Reading thru this old conversation I started thinking maybe this could be
done similar to params.

So adding a cpio command that takes a name which is a virtual cpio file.
Initrd gets a new parameter --cpio which takes the above cpio name but the
name should be optional and in that case the last used cpio file is used.
Not sure If --cpio usage without having run the cpio command should
generate an error or just silently create the virtual cpio file.

Michael, any thoughts on this?

/Christian
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