Different ways to boot an image?

Ken Restivo ken at restivo.org
Mon Jul 14 14:16:03 CEST 2008


My new FreeRunner is working fine. I pulled the SIM out of my el-cheapo Nokia 7-11 SpeakOut (AT&T) pay-as-you-go phone, and put it in the Neo, and lo and behold I'm making and receiving calls.

I'm trying to understand what are the different ways to boot a kernel and rootfs image, and what are the pros and cons of each.

I'd be glad to turn this into a WIKI page and/or edit existing ones. But first I'll ask here.

So far I've come up with this list of ways to boot:

1) From the flash image on the phone, which is flashed there:
	a) Via DFU
	b) Via zmodem or srecs
	c) Via the JTAG
	d) Via TFTP? (I don't recall)

2) From NFS boot (there's already a wiki page for this IIRC)

3) From a rootfs and/or kernel image located on a FAT or EXT2 partition on the SD card
	(I don't remember where I saw this documented, and can't seem to find it now)

4) From RAM
	a) Loaded via DFU?
	b) Loaded via TFTP?
	c) Loaded via SD card?

Is that an exhaustive list? Are there other ways to do it?
	
Anyway, there are some size and other limitations to the RAM-based method, I'm sure, and I vaguely remember seeing them mentioned, but don't remember where.

I'm asking because I have a (mostly) working image right now, and I want to experiment with running some different ones without flashing away the one that works.

Thanks!

-ken




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