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Subjectinitramfs howto?
FromChris Meadors <>
DateThu, 08 Apr 2004 15:17:07 -0400
I've been a monolithic kernel guy forever.  But with all the new toys
going into 2.6 I figured I'd try to catch up with the times.

I've got udev + hotplug halfway functioning, and wanted to try moving
even my fs and IDE/SCSI modules out of the kernel.  It seems the way to
do that is with an initramfs.

So I figure I'll start simple, I got klibc and built it.  Copied the the
lib and executables into a new tree, lib in lib and bins in bin.
Symlinked linuxrc to /bin/sh.  I also added a dev directory with ram0,
ram1, and initrd (later in my experimentation).  Then I cpio'd up the
tree, gzip'd it, and put it where I told grub to find it:
 "initrd (hd0,0)/boot/test/initramfs.cpio.gz"

When I boot the kernel associated with that initrd line, it says that it
found a compressed image at block 0.  But then panics saying it can't
mount the root filesystem.

I've tried various root= options.
>From /dev/ram0, /dev/ram1, /dev/initrd, and initramfs.  All fail.
Although /dev/ram0, spit out its own name instead of an unknown block
device 0,0.

So, what am I missing?  I've Googled for about an hour now.  Everyone is
just talking about the neat new features of initramfs, but no one says,
"do this".  The in-tree documentation isn't much better, although it is
what got me this far.  The early-userspace document talks about
short-circuting the kernel build to get a custom initramfs appended to
the kernel image.  But that seems a bit rough, shouldn't the bootloader
be able to do the appending?

Any help will be welcomed.

-- 
Chris

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