On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 03:53:21PM +0530, Anup Patel wrote: > If it is initramfs (i.e. CPIO image) then contents of CPIO archive > are extracted to create a ramfs instance. > > If it is initrd (i.e. some filesystem image) then RAM block device > is created in-place at initrd location. (Please correct me if I am > wrong about initrd here).
No. If it is an initrd image we still copy it into the rootfs first, and then load it into a ram disk. Take a look at init/initramfs.c:populate_rootfs() and init/do_mounts_initrd.c:initrd_load(). > So in case of initrd we might not want to free-up the RAM but > we can certainly free-up in case of initramfs. No, in either case we do not need the original initramfs/initrd memory. I suspect arm has this as a workaround for some weird legacy boot issue, but I can't see any reason why we would not want to free the memory on riscv.
