Boot DOC2000 readonly...

[Bill Seisler]

Here's my setup:
PIII 850, 256MB RAM, 144 MB DOC2000, Redhat Linux 7.1, Kernel version 
2.4.9, DOC formatted ext2.

I can boot from DOC without a problem. I have a nice little linux root 
filesystem on it and everything (approx 70 MB). I know I can trim it down 
some more if I have to.

The next step I have to do is to make the system capable of handling power 
outages (instead of powering down linux properly). The idea was to mount 
DOC read-only, reducing it to a ROM essentially and mounting writeable 
areas to a ramdisk. I have one problem, I do not know how to populate the 
ramdisk area or where during bootup this should be done properly. I can 
boot from an initrd and I've even played with a linuxrc file. However, nash 
is not the friendliest of shells (if you consider it a shell). I can mount 
stuff but I can't copy or dd anything to a ramdisk. The commands just don't 
work, even if I copy the binaries cp and dd to my initrd image.

I looked at the instructions provided with the MTD CVS, however, I think 
putting only what is written to in a ramdisk is a faster booting solution.

I like the idea of mounting one large ramdisk as var and populating it 
appropriately (including /var/tmp and /var/dev). If I use an initrd, and 
setup linuxrc to
mount /dev/nftla1 as root. Where would I put the commands to mount and 
populate the ramdisk?

And suggestions/ideas/detailed instructions are greatly appreciated.
-Bill