initrd question

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:40:05 +0000
"Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:

> At the moment mkinitrd goes through a big hoo-hah where it tries to
> determine what precise set of kernel modules are needed to mount the
> root filesystem, and no more.
> 
> But I don't understand why we don't just put every possible block
> device driver / LVM / crypto module / etc. into the initrd.  The
> ramdisk is discarded as soon as the root filesystem is mounted, so at
> most we're saving a few kilobytes of disk space.  At the same time,
> mkinitrd is massively more complicated than it really needs to be, and
> initrd images are non-portable between machines[*].


unpacking the initrd in the kernel takes real time. Easily a second
for a "really big" initrd as you're proposing...


-- 
Arjan van de Ven 	Intel Open Source Technology Centre
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