From my recent experiments it looks like in order to be able to use
initramfs not compiled into the kernel image but loaded from separate file by GRUB or LILO one must also build initrd into the kernel.
Am I right? If so, could somebody split initramfs and initrd (not only at configuration level but also at code level)? Shouldn't they be separated (and possibly initrd removed after some time)? In the mean time it should be documented in *config help.
Also somebody should add more documentation about initramfs (generating, writing scripts, producing image, the right method for chroot / pivot_root / ...). It took me whole week to find it out myself and I still have some doubths...