Tiny Core Linux

Tiny Core Base => TCB Bugs => Topic started by: wt0f on July 08, 2014, 01:05:56 AM

Title: Locate /tce in root of initramfs
Post by: wt0f on July 08, 2014, 01:05:56 AM
I guess this is more of a feature request than an actual bug.

I have spent the better part of a day and a half trying to make Tiny Core Linux load extensions when it boots. From everything I had read there were plenty of indications that as TCL booted it would look in the root directory for a directory named tce and process the extensions that are placed there in the optional subdirectory. Populated my onboot.lst file but the extensions would not load on boot. I could manually load them with the tce-load command.

Just a couple of minutes ago, after reading and tracing through the startup scripts, I finally got the extensions to load during boot by using tce=/ as a boot option. I had seen examples that used things like tce=sda1 and such but nothing that pointed directly to the active filesystem. After getting a better understanding of how /tce is discovered, I reread some of the documentation and found that my use case (netbooting TCL) was not exactly covered by the documentation.

I would suggest that the documentation be updated to cover how to make extensions work when netbooting. Frankly, a better solution is to add the root directory of the active filesystem to the list of locations that are searched for /tce.
Title: Re: Locate /tce in root of initramfs
Post by: curaga on July 08, 2014, 01:11:39 AM
It's not well documented, but the /tmp/builtin directory is intended for such purpose. So you'd have /tmp/builtin/optional and such, with no tce= bootcode.

A tce dir implies you can change things and have the changes stick, which is why it's only supposed to be on persistent, writable media such as hd, or when netbooting, nfs. Using tce= for a non-persistent dir may cause some slowdowns due to unnecessary operations on boot and shutdown.