large initrd image
 

Hi all.
I have such task:
Server with 8G ram must boot over network ( dhcp+tftp ).
root fs should be loaded to ram. I created some images for testing and found following:
if image size is about 500m it works, but even 600m is not working.
Boot process stops at: RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
no error,warnings.... it simply freeze.
I found some threads with similar questions, but i found no answers.
So question is: How to load large initrd image ( about 2-4 G ).
PS: Here is my init string:
DEFAULT linux
APPEND initrd=cent.gz ramdisk_size=6291456 ramdisk_blocksize=1024 root=/dev/ram rw

it is unable to find / root. it loads the kernel then loads the image but it stops when it cant find root. tell it where root is at. sence it will neve stop looking for the root. freezes. tell it root =/dev/ram0 see if that helps.

ram is the device ram0 is the block device.

Not sure if this will help, but IIRC the kernel makes the ram disk for the initrd a default size and if your initrd is bigger than that, it won't be loaded fully and will not mount or will mount with missing data. However, you can control the size the kernel will use for the initrd with the ramdisk_size command line option. You'll need to put this into the pxelinux config file for the host in the append configuration line (where you specify command line options to pass to the kernel). I believe the number you give has to be in kilobytes. I've used this top load big ramdisks before, but never one as big as yours... good luck!

Big thanks for answers.
2Drakeo: I`ll try on monday to set /dev/ram0 in fstab, may be I forgot about it.
2btmiller: As you see, I wrote in my first post, that I set ramdisk_size=6291456.
2all: My some other solution exist for my task ?
I found a lot of questions, but no answers....
Nowdays I is new type of servers. If I have about 10-20 Gb of ram, I don`t need hdd at all.