Re: Initrd and ramdisk support

From: Michael Tokarev
Date: Fri Sep 29 2006 - 05:14:02 EST


Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>> Unpacking initramfs...<0>Kernel panic - not syncing: bad gzip magic numbers
>> Unpacking initramfs...<0>Kernel panic - not syncing: no cpio magic
>>
>> i luckily was able to determine the malefactor. There was the initrd support
>> built into the kernel while the ramdisk driver was just built as a module.
>>
>> Is it senseful to have the possibility to built the Initramfs/Initrd-support
>> without having the ramdisk driver forced to be integrated also?
>
> I hardly see a point in using initrd support without ramdisk. Where would you
> store the initrd on instead?

I build kernels without ramdisk built into, but using initramfs, for quite some
time already. There was a patch somewhere around 2.6.15 or so, that removed
dependency of INITRD from RAMDISK, just a small Kconfig change. Now it's in
the mainline. For initramfs, there's no need for ramdisk - it reads the FS
image from memory (as passed to by loader), and unpacks it into ramfs - no
ramdisk is involved here.

/mjt
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