On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Nufarul Alb wrote:the use of initrd is a real pain in the butt. with multibooting GRUB loads the modules into memory and the kernel can take them from there. In this way the main kernel can be smaller, you won't need built-in filesystem drivers (they will be preloaded by GRUB), you will not have to recompile the entire kernel all the time, but only the modules.
There is a patch for the kernel that make it able to preload modules
before the acutal booting.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the issue, but this sounds like a job for
initrd. Someone jokingly mentioned booting wirelessly through a
cipe pipe, so you would stick iwconfig and cipe (and your RAID driver and
all the other wierd stuff) in the initrd. A lot of distros do this for you
automatically, including SuSE.
So how are the kernel and initrd images read? Grub has drivers for a fair
number of devices, and can read i86 BIOS-supported discs, conventional
Ethernet, some RAID (I think), etc. You can't load modules from your
regular filesystem until you can read your filesystem, meaning that the
module used to read your filesystem has to be provided by some other means.
Like initrd.
Hope this helps rather than smokes up the issue.
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