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    From
    SubjectRe: Linux-2.1.92 - Feature Freeze
    Date
    Followup to:  <6g6m3g$53m@pell.pell.portland.or.us>
    By author: o.r.c@transmeta.com (david parsons)
    In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
    >
    > I suspect a lot of that is because of the documentation for it.
    >
    > I do what is basically an initrd as part of the Mastodon
    > distribution, but instead of setting up an initrd, I just do all the
    > steps by hand and leave the user with a system that contains a 1.4mb
    > black hole that used to contain the ramdisk.
    >
    > I've looked at the documentation in Documentation/initrd.txt, but
    > then my head starts hurting and I start looking around for a way to
    > do BIOS floppy access instead. I admit that it just may be that
    > I'm old and resistant to change (libc 5.0.9, anyone?), but I have
    > been working on Unix systems for over 20 years now and, if the
    > documentation is too esoteric for me, it may be too esoteric for
    > other people as well.
    >

    I guess I never really read the docs (I learned it from a
    boot-loader-writer's perspective), but basically, this is the idea:

    - Use a boot loader such as recent versions of SYSLINUX, LILO, or
    LOADLIN to load the kernel and the initrd. If you're loading from a
    floppy, I would strongly suggest looking at SYSLINUX, but I'm of
    course biased.

    - When the initrd comes up, it will run /linuxrc (usually a shell
    script) on that disk.

    - /linuxrc will typically write the device number of the real root
    device to /proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev

    - When /linuxrc exits, the kernel will mount the real root device and
    continue.

    -hpa

    --
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