Zachary Kotlarek wrote: > with an initrd I'd need to maintain a whole set of binaries and > libraries in a file systems that doesn't get used except for the > first 5 seconds after boot. While there are certainly things you can > do with an initrd I've never seen the benefits as outweighing the > hassle of creating and maintaining the filesystem.
Well, initramfs, not initrd. They are different: 1) I believe an initramfs is mounted earlier than an initrd would be 2) an initramfs would do more than just load required modules 3) there is no FS on the initramfs image (it's just a cpio-format file) There may be more differences, but I can't think of them ATM. It would be fairly easy to use whatever executables are on the system at the time the kernel gets compiled. Yes, they are copies, not symlinks, but they would update every time the kernel gets recompiled. (Not that replacing the system glibc is always a good idea anyway, but whatever. Other stuff that got upgraded would be updated in the initramfs.) And it wouldn't be in a separate file like an initrd is; it would be built right into the kernel binary. It wouldn't use appreciably more RAM after it was done doing its thing, though, because the last thing it would do before chrooting into the final system and exec'ing /sbin/init would be to delete all the files it holds (except udev's logged events, which would be deleted after being replayed). The system would be left with one root directory, and one dentry for the target directory of the chroot -- the directory containing the real root FS. The kernel binary would be too big for a floppy boot, but 2.6 doesn't support directly booting from a floppy anymore either. I'm not sure how there would be any maintenance, I guess. The process of creating the image is hard to figure out (or at least, it was hard for me to figure out), but that's what the book would be teaching. Maybe I should try to write a hint instead. ;-)
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