Question on initrd and initramfs

Ezequiel Garcia elezegarcia at gmail.com
Sat Sep 29 13:39:53 EDT 2012


Hey Mulyadi,

On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 2:27 PM, Mulyadi Santosa
<mulyadi.santosa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi...
>
> On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 5:56 PM, Ezequiel Garcia <elezegarcia at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Please note that the image you give qemu (or bootloader)
>> to use as initrd is *not* formatted using any mkfs.
>> It's just created with:
>>
>> $ find . | cpio -H newc -o > ../initramfs.cpio
>
> Yup I am aware of that :)
>
>> And the compiled kernel has no support for *any* filesystem.
>> So, the question is: how are those files formatted?
>
> Now that's something I can't answer definitively. I just guess that,
> somewhere inside kernel code, there is certain code that can't be
> toggled on or off i.e it is always enabled. And that code, one of
> them, is tackling this initramfs unpacking.
>
>> (Guess the answer is: look at the code)
>
> Eventually...well, yes :)
>
>

Yesterday I got it working.
(Though I still don't understand how does initramfs works)

It's fairly easy, but to my surprise,
there isn't much documentation that explains
in detail the process of running with initrd, versus the process of
running with initrd.

If I find some time I might post some explanation later...

Thanks!
Ezequiel.



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