[BRLTTY] braille-kernel-image(s)

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2005, Samuel Thibault wrote:

> Now, one area where some kernel support would be useful is the startup.
> We have discussed about it with Sebastien and we think that what could
> be done is a bunch of very basic drivers and a very basic kernel
> messages reader or even console reader. It could be used in grub too,
> and even in Manufacturer BIOSes.

This is easy to solve with the new initramfs mechanism in 2.6.x kernels.  
You could pretty easily have a minimal and statically linked brltty 
binary started from there even before the real root filesystem is 
mounted.  This is almost guaranteed that the kernel will get to its 
initramfs before any typical boot failure does occur so this is almost 
like if braille support was actually part of the kernel.

It is also pretty easy to do since (at least on Fedora and even older 
RedHat releases) there is a script which is executed whenever a new 
kernel is installed to create the initramfs with appropriate kernel 
modules needed to mount the real root filesystem.  That script is 
usually called /sbin/mkinitrd.  Modifying that script to also include 
BRLTTY a part of its setup operations should not be too hard.


Nicolas