Re: Some ramdisk and initrd questions...

[Russell King - ARM Linux Admin]

Steven J. Hill writes:
> kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k char-major-4, errno = 2
> Warning: unable to open an initial console.

The above two lines are trying to tell you that it is unable to open
a console.  The kernel will try to open the console using /dev/console.
Check that your console has major,minor set to 5,1 in the ram disk.

> kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k binfmt-464c, errno = 2
> kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k binfmt-464c, errno = 2
> Kernel panic: No init found.  Try passing init= option to kernel.

binfmt-464c is the code for the ELF binary format.  Did you compile
ELF support into the kernel?  It appears that it isn't in there.

> Second, is it really necessary to use 'initrd' if I want to have a
> ramdisk located in RAM and do not plan on mounting a "real" root
> filesystem after it loads the initrd image? My understanding is that
> the original purpose of initrd was to provide a small start up ramdisk
> to load kernel modules so that booting could continue on to mount the
> real working root filesystem. If I only want what is in my ramdisk, why
> do I have to bother with initrd? Won't making a call to setup_ramdisk
> above with the starting address in memory of my ramdisk do just fine?

Please remember that the conventional ramdisk is normally loaded from
floppy in this case, not from RAM.  The way the ramdisks work, the
ramdisk data is not stored in a contiguous chunk either, so loading it
into the kernel is going to be non-trivial.
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