Example of ARM based linux board using initramfs and serial console

[Ben Scott]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Thomas Charron <twaffle at gmail.com> wrote:
>  There IS something that I can't recall the exact specifics of, but
> it's along the lines of a 'magic identifier' in the filesystem that
> says it can be a root FS by the kernel.

  We're still talking Linux, right?

  To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing.  Any filesystem
can be mounted as a root filesystem.  There's no magic in the
filesystem.  (The kernel will panic if it then cannot find an initial
program to start, but it will still mount the filesystem first.)

  You may be thinking of the "rdev" field in the kernel boot image
file.  It gives major and minor numbers for the default root device,
which are used if you don't specify a "root=" argument on the kernel
command line.

-- Ben