just a funny effect that I forgot to report in the meantime.
If I boot normally from CF card with your USB linked kernel it doesn't mount the USB devices during boot that I added to fstab (eg. kernel is to slow in loading USB drivers/devices), but after booting I can mount them manually, so it seems to try to early.
BUT if I add a rootdelay=30 the boot is as fast as usally BUT the USB is properly mounted from fstab.
Strange, isn't it ...
But because this is a positive effect without any harm I'll leave it in autorun.bat also if the root is a non-USB device
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And I think it is not fair to let you wait any longer on my testresults
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YES, with rootdelay=30 it boots also from USB as long as the CF card is present to serve the vmlinux kernel. So with a small CF card (down to 8MB) we already have an USB boot !
It works quite straightforward - it simply takes the 30 sec until the bootbar in LCD start to move and then it goes ...
Why did it take so long to report back - well I tested it not only with the latest DMM standard image but also with some others - showing blue screens on booting And yes, it seems to work there also, as long as the image is not to old and the secondstage bootloader is from the latest CSV (I already added to multiboot how to update seconstage.gz)
The only problem is that even when moving rootdelay to 60 or higher I cann't make these USB bootet images mount the USB from /etc/fstab
But mounting them manually with multiboot info works, so this is not a real problem.
So version 6.2 of Multiboot coming out today as Beta will contain USB Boot support with CF card GREAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT !
Version 6.3 then will be able to do this also without CF and just USB device, but thiis is painfull to devleop and debug because I have to modify the autoexec.bat in flash and copy there the USB enabled vmlinux.gz. It is not TOO dificult and I'm sure that it will work, because I used the same approach for enableing multiboot on harddisk only installations (but making it run there was also a pain, because it needs serial flash when I do something wrong)
So this version of multiboot will have to wait until next weekend.
Again thanks for your help, and I hope it is OK to package the vmlinux.gz into the Multiboot 6.2 BETA kit, so that others can try and enjoy it also until the image buildes will start to build their vmlinux.gz this way - as a temporary workaround I implemented a copy V in multiboot to update only vmlinux.gz with the USB extended one, but this is not a perfect solution, because all patches adaption of the kernel
the imagebuilders might have done is lost due to this.
Ciao
thowi