>Bill Moseley wrote: > So is the purpose of initrd to have a small kernel but be able to load > whatever modules might be needed for the currently running hardware? > > If so I often wonder why that's needed -- that is, why not just build > a kernel with everything compiled in? If, say, installing from CD > then size of the kernel isn't critical (not to mention that the > modules take up space, too), and most machines have quite a bit of > RAM these days, so I would not think that an issue either. Which > brings me back to the point that maybe I don't really understand the > need for initrd...
If you have LVM and your root is also on LVM, then you need to have an initrd. I did it that way, keeping 1 boot partition in ext2. Even though i had LVM support compiled into the kernel, it wouldn't work unless i had a initrd made with lvmcreate_initrd. Otherwise, i think it's probably used to keep the kernel image size down by using modules. And when you use modules you may run into the situation where the kernel needs a module that for instance is on a reiserfs partition but reiserfs isn't compiled in the kernel so it doesn't know how to read that partition and so it fails to load the module. Regards, Benedict -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]