Re: [gentoo-user] ramfs - is it necessary ???

[Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.]

On Thursday 22 February 2007 01:45, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Thursday 22 February 2007, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> > On Wednesday 21 February 2007, "pat" <pat@××××××××.org> wrote about
> > 'Re:
> >
> > [gentoo-user] ramfs - is it necessary ???':
>
> First, I think the OP is confused between ramfs and initramfs.Not quite
> the same thing...

Yeah, I hoped I cleared that up with my first reply.

> But the thread has become about initramfs so we'll stick with that

I think this is more what the OP was concerned about.

> And the OP should keep in mind that the initrd format was dumped many
> many kernel versions ago and these days we use initramfs,

I am fairly certain I was still using my custom initrd (not an initramfs) 
until 2.6.17 -- I'm fairly sure 2.6.20 still *supports* initrd format, even 
if initramfs is preferred now.

For the life of me, I always found it easier to get an initrd working 
rather 
than an initramfs -- the whole chroot/exec vs. pivot_root vs. switch_root 
step always failed for me when using an initramfs (and the very same shell 
script worked as an initrd).  Also, a script-made initrd is still just a 
compressed filesystem, easy to deal with, but a script-made initramfs 
(particularly one made by genkernel) is not just a cpio archive, it's a 
series of them separated by some !!!!KERNEL_MAGIC!!!! strings in the middle 
of binary data -- nearly impossible to work with using standard tools.

At least, that's been my experience, others may have found the process 
easier.

-- 
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