On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Cam Hutchison <c...@xdna.net> wrote: > David Witbrodt <dawit...@sbcglobal.net> writes: > >>(My goal was to >>produce a kernel that boots without an initrd; most people will not >>share that goal.) > > I would have thought that most people would share that goal, since > building an initrd is useful for only two reasons I can think of: > > 1) You are building a distro kernel that needs to run on many different > types of machines, since you don't know what modules would need to be > built in to find the root filesystem. > > 2) You have a complex method of getting the root filesystem mounted - > perhaps encrypted LVM on top of a network block device, etc, etc, etc. > > Since most people who are building their own kernels probably do not > have either of these requirements, building without an initrd would > make things a lot simpler. > > I looked into building an initrd with my kernel builds, but it just made > things more complicated and I could not see the point. > > Is there some other reason to use an initrd when building your own > customized kernels?
3) AFAIK, a initrd is needed for selinux. AFAIK! It's definitely the case with upstart and systemd; I've never tried using selinux without an initrd on RHEL 5 or an older Fedora, so it's maybe not the case with sysvinit; although I can't see, off-hand, why it would work in the latter case if it fails in the former two. 4) If you have "/usr" on its own partition and don't want to have some non-fatal errors and warning, you have to mount it in the initrd. http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken [5) On Ubuntu, if you have "/var" on its own partition and don't want ureadahead to fail (or have to turn it off), you have to mount it in the initrd.] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAOdo=SynmvR3aK7nsayX4+yjMtV0=CHbRc+CATtkwXpdCKdF=a...@mail.gmail.com