Heres a dumb one - where does intitrd `img' come from

[Harry Putnam]

Jay Turner <jkt at redhat.com> writes:


>> There is 1012MB of data there though... yikes.  Is that normal?
>
> The initrd image is built as part of the kernel installation process.
> There's a postinstallation script which calls /sbin/new-kernel-pkg which
> takes care of creating the initrd image and modifying the boot loader.
>
> As for their being 1G of stuff in your BUILD directory, it really just
> depends on what you've been building.  You might want to check in there and
> see where all of the space is getting utilized and prune as needed, but if
> you've been building lots of packages recently, then having that much space
> utilized isn't that strange.

Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> writes:

>> Where does the /boot/initrd*.img come from.
>
> mkinitrd creates it.
>
>> There is 1012MB of data there though... yikes.  Is that normal?
>
> 1GiB?  Certainly not.  1012KiB (~ 1 MiB) would be something more
> reasonable, depending on the number of modules and start-up programs
> that are necessary to mount the root filesystem and pivot to it.

OK, thanks for the tips on initrd*
The 1012MB I mentioned is from building 1 single package.  The *116
kernel.

I ran:
    make O=/usr/local/build/kernel oldconfig
    make O=/usr/local/build/kernel xconfig
    make O=/usr/local/build/kernel bzImage
    make O=/usr/local/build/kernel modules

and now there is 1012MB (one GB (+/-)) in that build directory.

cd $BUILD
[root] # du -sh `ls`
   816K    System.map
   30M     arch
   5.4M    crypto
   389M    drivers
   152M    fs
   9.2M    include
   4.0K    include2
   1.8M    init
   1.2M    ipc
   8.0M    kernel
   3.7M    lib
   7.4M    mm
   208M    net
   1.4M    scripts
   1.3M    security
   84M     sound
   48K     usr
   36M     vmlinux

Seems a little excessive eh?