Comment 8 for bug 524893

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Loïc Minier (lool) wrote : Re: Can't boot initramfses

@Dustin: I'd love if you could assist on this bug; to reproduce, boot:
http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/lucid/main/installer-armel/current/images/versatile/netboot/

with qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -cpu cortex-a8 -m 256 -kernel vmlinuz -initrd initrd.gz

what you will probably see is:
[ 1.866499] Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs...
[ 1.875076] rootfs image is not initramfs (junk in compressed archive); looks like an initrd
[...]
[ 5.347930] RAMDISK: Couldn't find valid RAM disk image starting at 0.

which means that the initramfs support doesn't work. (I also tried with a gunzipped initrd to no luck)

We want initramfs support as on the other plaforms, but that doesn't work for an unknown reason; apparently this work on real hardware, so likely specific to the qemu ARM loader.

NB: the latest linux upload has CONFIG_CRAMFS=y on armel, so the RAMDISK is likely to become mountable as an initrd; that's not what we want, but it's a good workaround for now...