> Why are you trying so hard to create an initrd image? I would just > compile the modules statically into the kernel and forget the whole > initrd thing altogether if I were you. The distro packagers have all > the time and resources they need to create their initrd images, which > is why they do it for their shipped versions, but the average Joe who > compiles his own kernel doesn't really need to do that.
This is not a possibility. Initrds are not hard at all to create. I have done so many many times. They allow you to do such things as have one kernel for different systems and only load the modules that you need even if those modules are needed for such things as the root file system. In this case, this is not for a typical system. It is for my Linux rescue/util bootable cdrom. Having a kernel that has everything compiled in is not realistic as the kernel would be massive. I am trying to reduce the memory footprint so that it will run on systems with small amounts of memory. Hence trying to switch from romfs to cramfs would be an advantage during the initial boot as cramfs only decompresses the files that are being used whereas other filesystems (romfs, ext2, etc) get totally decompressed in ram. Once the root filesystem on the cd is mounted, the initrd can be freed and only a small (currently < 1.5 meg) tmpfs filesystem is used for rw whereas the rest is on the cd itself. If the machine has the ram, the kernel will cache files in ram as they are used. The kernel also needs to be potentially booted from the network and use an initrd to get a dhcp address and then nfs the main cd image. > I typically use mkinitrd -k <kernel> -i <image> on the SuSE Enterprise > Servers that I set up at work. I've never created an initrd image for > a Debian box, since I typically just statically compile the required > modules right in. Again, this is not a solution. Debian similarly has it's own mkinitrd. >>>------> -- +-------------+-----------------------+---------------+ | Ed Schaller | Dark Mist Networking | psuedoshroom | +-------------+-----------------------+---------------+
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