Random footnotes of Engineering

I've been meaning to write this up for a while. There are a number of different uses for having a ramdisk image to the operating environment. I initially did this work as part of the Honeycomb platform development, but it applies equally well for any other environment. I'll specifically target this for the Nevada/OpenSolaris release, but I do also have the details for Solaris 10 if folks are interested.

So to start with the important aspect is to get Solaris installed onto a server somehow (use jumpstart/dvd/whatever). You may want to get it set up with the variety of packages you want in the image, but that's not necessary as you can add them later if you like. Once you are here it is then a matter of taring up the bits you want.

Once we have this tar image we can start doing the real work. So untar this onto a working directory and let's go through the steps to create a working ramdisk.

• Modify /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc to remove bootpath specification
  
• copy /kernel and /platform to boot slice
  
• create ramdisk image from directory using root_archive
  
• copy ramdisk image to boot slice
  
• modify boot/grub/menu.lst on boot slice to have the module point at the ramdisk image
  

And that's it. This gives you a bootable version of a Nevada/OpenSolaris ramdisk image.