The initial RAM disk image or short initrd comes handy during the bring-up of a new machine or when the flashed operating system shall be inspected.
The footprint of this headless image is relatively small.
To tinker with the initrd image a serial console attached to your board, for U-Boot access, is required.
The following commands may differ from the version of U-Boot installed on your device.
To use the amlogic-image-headless-initrd image, a little bit of preparation is needed. To boot the ramdisk image we do have to load the Linux Kernel, a device tree blob and the initrd image into RAM first.
There are multiple ways to do so. In this example we do use tftp to load the image over the network from a development host.:
g12a_u212_v1# tftp ${loadaddr} uImage
g12a_u212_v1# tftp ${dtb_mem_addr} meson-sm1-x96-max.dtb
g12a_u212_v1# tftp ${initrd_high} amlogic-image-headless-initrd-amediatech-x96-max.cpio.xz.u-boot
g12a_u212_v1# setenv bootargs "console=ttyAML0,115200 panic=3 root=/dev/ram0 rw"
g12a_u212_v1# bootm ${loadaddr} ${initrd_high} ${dtb_mem_addr}