On Fri, Jan 01, 2016 at 06:27:10PM +0000, Simon Hobson wrote:
> John Rigg <dev1@???> wrote:
>
> > Wasn't the original reason for having an initrd that the boot loader,
> > probably LILO at the time, couldn't handle a kernel image above a
> > certain size?
>
> I suspect you are thinking of the problem that it couldn't access sectors past a certain point due to limitation in the BIOS - that was the reason for a separate /boot which meant you could guarantee to have any future kernel within the range accessible to LILO.
>
> The separate issue is having a modular kernel - which I'm in favour of BTW. If you use LVM, MD (raid), disk controllers needing a kernel module, or one of a few other things - then you can have a catch-22 situation where the kernel needs to load a module to access

Guys, kernel modularity has nothing to do with initramfs. The only
reason it is needed, as Rainer pointed out, is to host all the drivers
needed to mount the root fs (or to be more precise, to mount *any*
unknown root fs, as a kernel shipped with a general-purpose
distribution has to do).

If your root fs does not change every five minutes, you can have a
custom kernel with ext4 and a few other drivers compiled in, and get
rid of initramfs altogether. Then, the usage that has been done of
initramfs in the last few years is just an overkill, IMHO.

HND

KatolaZ

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[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
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