[Gllug] erm, help...

[Christian Smith]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, will wrote:

>What is an initrd image?

It is a compressed ram disk image, that is loaded before the real root is
mounted.

Useful for fully modularised kernels, as even the root media drivers can
now be modules loaded from this ram disk. For example, my SCSI drivers are
loaded as modules from my initrd, then the SCSI disk mounted as root once
all the initrd stuff is loaded.

The only drivers needed to be compiled into the kernel to support this are
ram disk support, and ext2 support. All other block devices and FS can be
modules.

To view the contents of the initrd, do:
# zcat /boot/initrd-<blah> > /tmp/initrd.img
# mount /tmp/initrd.img /mnt/tmp -o loop
# ls /mnt/tmp

The file that does the work is linuxrc. Mine is:
#!/bin/nash

echo "Loading scsi_mod module"
insmod /lib/scsi_mod.o
echo "Loading sd_mod module"
insmod /lib/sd_mod.o
echo "Loading sym53c8xx module"
insmod /lib/sym53c8xx.o


>
>Will.
>

Christian

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