Re: [DOC] Update item on FAQ

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

Gerd Knorr wrote:

>>> "Some distros (notably SLES9) have a mkinitrd that adds garbage to 
>>> the end of the initrd.  These initrds will not work with Xen.  To 
>>> correct this problem, you should gunzip the initrd, and then gzip it 
>>> again."
>>
>>
>> !?!?!
>>
>> What's in the garbage?  Presumably it's there for some reason?
>
>
> Sure it is, it is the image for the fancy console screen.  Doesn't 
> hurt when it isn't present.  And as vesafb doesn't work with xenified 
> linux kernels it isn't used anyway.

Ah, that makes sense.  Perhaps it's common enough then that we should 
work around it.

> Easiest way to permanently get rid of it is "rpm -e bootsplash" (i.e. 
> mkinitrd will stop appending the image to the initrd then).  
> Nevertheless I don't see why it causes trouble, the domain builder 
> should simply take the ramdisk blob and pass it as-is to the kernel, no?

Unfortunately it doesn't.  It actually decompresses the initrd before 
passing it to the kernel.  I'm not sure why we decompress it, anyone 
know why?

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>   Gerd
>