Steve Crosby wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Steve Crosby <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 1. Education ;)

Always a good reason.

>> 2. Providing an emergency shell in the event of failure to mount root 
>> filesystem

That's reasonable too, however I never recall needing that capability.

The times I have had problems have been when grub can't load the kernel 
and if I can load the kernel I can always edit the command line in grub 
to use init=/bin/bash.

> 3. (not relevant to LFS) Auto-detecting which device the root is on,
> when the boot device is portable\non-persistent (usb\cdrom\etc)
> e.g. my LFS can end up as an iso, and run in a VM, or applied to usb
> stick, therefore the real root device is variable.

Can't you use 'mount'?  I get something like:

/dev/sda8 on / type ext3 (rw)

Wouldn't that be easier?

To me, the biggest reason to use initiramfs is if you want to have the 
root fs on a sw raid device, e.g. md0.  All the other reasons are fairly 
exotic.  root on lvm?  why?  On nfs?  Maybe, but still exotic. 
Encrypted?  Data, yes, but why the root fs?

There seems to be a trend in Linux to embrace the complex when simple 
solutions will suffice for most people.   The first exhibit is systemd.

   -- Bruce
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