Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] RFC: Moving firmware blobs out of the kernel.

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

Alan Cox wrote:
>>>
>> I tried to push for that two years ago.  I'd be more than happy to pull 
>> that out of the freezer.
> 
> Its kind of irrelevant if you need an initrd or not. The only question of
> relevance is "does it get built when I type make all". Almost all Linux
> users are using initrd without problem - because their distro ensures
> "make install" and the packaged kernels do the right thing.
> 

Obviously.  I'm equally obviously referring to klibc, which was designed 
so that the resulting vmlinux/bzImage/... file contains the necessary 
initramfs, regardless of issues like cross-compilation, draconian size 
restrictions(*), and so forth.

	-hpa

(*) Not saying that a klibc-based initramfs is necessarily smaller than 
the in-kernel code it replaces, but the total size is << than the size 
of the kernel proper, which isn't true when using a full-featured libc.