On December 26, 2003 12:30 am, pking123-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org wrote:
doesn't ash (or any shell) require a kernel underneath? So why don't I just toss initrd and boot straight into the kernel I was going to use anyway?
Debian kernels are modular. Almost everything is a module (even basic IDE support). I'm far from an expert on initrd but, I believe, the initrd is required in these circumstances (where you need a module to mount your root filesystem). If your root filesystem is on IDE then you need the ide_disk module loaded before you can mount the root filesystem, once that's mounted then additional modules that you need can simply be modprobed /lib/modules on your root filesystem. Another case of needing an initrd would be if you have your root filesystem on a software raid device (well some hardware raids as well probably). LVM is likely another case where you'd require initrd, although having / on lvm is not recommended.
This is what I am accustomed to doing in just about every other compilation I have done.Why the extra layer of bureaucracy?
By using modules you can support a maximum range of hardware without having every single driver compiled into the kernel.
As for the modules, how do I know which modules to put in there? I recognise the "benefit" of initrd is to selectively install modules in a way that does not cause conflicts with other modules. So, I guess that means I can't include all of them. :-)
There are a series of files and directories under /etc/mkinitrd/ that let you specify additional modules to load, programs to add to the initrd, filesystem to use, scripts to run, etc. mkinitrd is just a (very configurable) shell script so you can read through it to figure out how the Debian folk decide what goes in, I've never looked at it in detail.
Nevertheless, I have created the beginnings of my own initrd, but am at a loss as to the modules, and how to write modules.conf.
You probably should not manually modify modules.conf (man update-modules), if you're talking about modules.conf in the initrd then I'm not too sure ... hopefully covered in the various manpages. -- Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org> http://www.wehave.net/ Georgetown, Ontario, Canada Debian GNU/Linux -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml