Boot the Raspberry Pi 2 with custom kernel and initramfs

Question

I want to boot my Raspberry Pi 2 with a custom configuration. Therefore I have a kernel image and an initramfs file. The /boot directory looks like this:

/boot/my_kernel.img
/boot/my_initrd.img

I would like to use the minimum of files in /boot. I copy:

/boot/bootcode.bin
/boot/fixup.dat
/boot/start.elf

from https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware. After that I create the file

/boot/cmdline.txt

with the arguments for the kernel. Finally I create

/boot/config.txt

with the following content:

kernel=my_kernel.img
initramfs my_initrd.img followkernel

My questions:

• Is this enough to boot the Raspberry Pi 2 or do I need something else?
• Can I remove fixup.dat?

Answer 1

I don't know about fixup.dat but — provided you derived your kernel configuration from the Pi2's — replace the kernel and initrd and Bob's your uncle. FYI I did that with an Orange Pi, not exactly a Raspberry Pi but it's close. My kernel was compiled on a Gentoo environment and fetched from Sunxi 3.4. It did work.