Shachar Shemesh wrote:
IIRC, they are using a new mechanism to generate an initrd replacement (this is NOT an initrd in the usual sense of the word, but something understood by the kernel directly). Sadly, I don't know the precise details of the change. Perchance one of the kernel devs on this list can elaborate further?
This is just a guess, but I believe they are switching from initrd to initramfs. It's a CPIO archive (read: tar file) that is included as part of the kernel at compile time that Linux 2.6 kernels will extract into a internal tmpfs file system and will attempt to run "init" from first.
If this succeeds, this will be the boot proccess (that will usually do initrd style things and switch_root() to the real root file system after done). Otherwise a backwoards compatible boot occurs.
This approach will allow in the future to throw out all the code in the kernel that has anything to do with finding the root file system, mounting NFS as root fs, kernel DHCP and IP setting (aka autoconfiguration) and replacing them will "early user space" - user space code compiled and linked against a mini-libc like library called klibc.
This has been 60 seconds about the new initramfs :-) Cheers Gilad -- Gilad Ben-Yossef <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Codefidence. A name you can trust(tm) Web: http://codefidence.com | SIP: [EMAIL PROTECTED] IL: +972.9.8650475 ext. 201 | Fax: +972.9.8850643 US: +1.212.2026643 ext. 201 | Cel: +972.52.8260388 `Y'know, I was just saying to myself, "Self," I said to myself, "you really need an enterprise datacenter architecture that leverages middleware based on robust frameworks." Wow, they must have been reading my mind!' -- Anonymous. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
