Re: Keep initrd tasks running?

From: Phillip Susi
Date: Wed Oct 19 2005 - 13:52:48 EST


I thought that the key difference between initrd and initramfs is that initrd uses pivot_root, initramfs does not. From what I have read, some consider pivit_root to be an ugly hack, so initramfs was made in such a way that you don't pivot. Is this incorrect?

The whole reason that pivot was made was to allow the initrd filesystem to be moved and the real root mounted, all while processes ( at least init, because it can't exit ) continued to execute, maintaining their open files on the initrd filesystem. Just instead of those files being in / they got moved to /initrd.

Under that system it is possible to leave things running, but I thought that with initramfs, init actually exited and the kernel unmounted the initramfs, and mounted the real root and ran the real init.

John Richard Moser wrote:

AFAIK it's pivoted and then umounted, which frees it. This doesn't mean
it has to be freed.. . .


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