Hi, during the weekend I tried to build a CRUX 2.4 PXE installation "medium". After power cycling my ALIX board about 50 times (hopefully without damage) I got a very stripped down Linux 2.6.24 Kernel running with serial console and nfsroot support. But I recognised the following problems: 1. squashfs + NFS doesn't really make sense 2. init doesn't work via the serial console (even if it dup2()s /dev/console to stdout) 3. manually edited module lists are really undesirable and inflexible, this applies to init which loads this list I have to add that CRUX 2.3 worked via NFS, but mounting another NFS share after booting caused to system to hang. Generally the whole init and boot system of the installation CD is quite imperfect and inflexible and I suggest to replace it. I thought and research into it and came up with the following ideas: o replace busybox with embutils [1] (or similar collections), klibc [2] and dash [3] o include klibc or dietlibc [4] o configure dhcp + nfs in userspace o load squashfs via tftp o rewrite init in C or C++ (uSTL) o automatic module loading The last point is a bit problematic, because it would mean to write some kind of mini udev which read sysfs' modalias, determine whether it's a hard disk, cdrom drive or network card and pass over the modalias to modprobe. The second possibility would be to actually use udev and include all modules in the initramfs image. What do you think about it? Regards Matthias-Christian [1] http://www.fefe.de/embutils/ [2] git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/dash/dash.git [3] git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/libs/klibc/klibc.git [4] http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/