Gentoo Archives: gentoo-amd64

From: Joshua Hoblitt <jhoblitt@××××××××××.edu>
To: gentoo-amd64@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Baselayout 2 (Was: Sun and GPL)
Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 22:54:01
Message-Id: 20070530225732.GA27296@ifa.hawaii.edu
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Baselayout 2 (Was: Sun and GPL) by Wil Reichert
1 The terminilogy of initramfs/initrd is used pretty lossely, even by
2 kernel devs. My understanding is that typically 'initrd' is refering to
3 an actual filesystem image (created on a loopback) and get's mounted a a
4 ramdisk and used at the root filesystem. Where as an initramfs image is
5 just a CPIO archive that gets unpacked into a tmpfs filesystem that is
6 then mounted as root. initramfs images can be either built into the
7 kernel image or loaded from an external file. Byeond the format there's
8 not much difference bewteen them. In theory an initramfs iamge could be a
9 bit smaller as it doesn't have to drag around the filesystem metadata
10 with it. Also, as it's just a CPIO archive a driver for the
11 filesystem type need not be built into the kernel.
12
13 Wikipedia considers initramfs & initrd to refer to the same thing:
14
15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initrd
16
17 Cheers,
18
19 -J
20
21 --
22 On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 09:38:17PM -0700, Wil Reichert wrote:
23 > On 5/29/07, Joshua Hoblitt <jhoblitt@××××××××××.edu> wrote:
24 > >On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 02:33:18AM +0200, Florian D. wrote:
25 > >> FYI, genkernel is creating an initrd, not an initramfs, which is the
26 > >preferred way nowadays.
27 > >> Information on how to setup an initramfs can be found at:
28 > >> http://lldn.timesys.com/docs/initramfs
29 > >
30 > >Umm, I think you need to check your facts. genkernel creates a gzip'd
31 > >CPIO archive named "initramfs-genkernel-arch-versionstring"...
32 >
33 > So the command 'genkernel initrd' creates a file called
34 > 'initramfs-...' which contains files called etc/initrd.defaults and
35 > etc/initrd.scripts. Poor naming conventions but it looks like an
36 > initrd to me.
37 >
38 > Wil
39 > --
40 > gentoo-amd64@g.o mailing list
41 >