Rick Moen:
> Quoting John Morris (jmorris@???):
>
> > Nope, that negates one of the principle reasons to use an initramfs in
> > the first place. You assume the stock kernel can see the drive where
> > you intend to put this new partition; one of the big drivers of initrd
> > in the first place was exotic hardware, etc. so GRUB uses BIOS
> > (including extension ROMs on controller cards) to load both the kernel
> > and the initrd so it can take whatever steps are needed, i.e load the
> > right modules, start lvm, setup encrypted filesystem magic, etc. to make
> > the main drive/partitions/etc. visible. Your idea could deal with most
> > everything that didn't need a kernel module but totally fails at that
> > task.
>

> Step 1.  Compile a kernel that includes inline all key drivers including
>          those needed to find the root filesystem.
> Step 2.  Profit!

>
> That's the old-school method.

And that works when the root filesystem is on a device with fixed major/
minor number, e.g. /dev/sda2 /dev/hda1, and even /dev/md1 for md
devices with the old (0.90) format superblock if they are auto-assebled.
It doesn't work for devices with dynamic device numbers.

Just be shure that e.g. /dev/sda2 points to the right disk if you have
more than one, and ohh, don't compile in usb-storage and accidentally
leave an usb-stick connected while rebooting, it could show up as
/dev/sda.

My impression is that the kernel is going in the direction where the
old-school method is harder to do simply because the kernel devs
doesn't care about it, but you can counter that by keeping things
simple, if you wish.

Regards,
/Karl Hammar

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