From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Wed, 30 Oct 2002 04:28:17 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Wed, 30 Oct 2002 04:28:17 -0500 Received: from caramon.arm.linux.org.uk ([212.18.232.186]:43780 "EHLO caramon.arm.linux.org.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Wed, 30 Oct 2002 04:28:16 -0500 Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 09:34:37 +0000 From: Russell King To: Jeff Garzik Cc: Miles Bader , andersen@codepoet.org, Dave Cinege , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Abbott and Costello meet Crunch Time -- Penultimate 2.5 merge candidate list. Message-ID: <20021030093437.A27726@flint.arm.linux.org.uk> Mail-Followup-To: Jeff Garzik , Miles Bader , andersen@codepoet.org, Dave Cinege , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <200210272017.56147.landley@trommello.org> <200210300229.44865.dcinege@psychosis.com> <3DBF8CD5.1030306@pobox.com> <200210300322.17933.dcinege@psychosis.com> <20021030085149.GA7919@codepoet.org> <3DBFA0F8.9000408@pobox.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5.1i In-Reply-To: <3DBFA0F8.9000408@pobox.com>; from jgarzik@pobox.com on Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 04:06:00AM -0500 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 04:06:00AM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote: > It should be pretty easy to populate initramfs from ROM... Typical embedded initrds do fairly disgusting tricks to "work around" the limitations of themselves. These tricks are solved cleanly by initramfs, but I'll guess that the reason embedded people will complain is because it is different, and embedded people don't like to unlearn old tricks. Here's two things that initramfs does that there is no way in hell an initrd can ever do: - once you've finished with various stuff, you can remove it and thereby free up the space that file was occupying for use by anything without having to wait for the whole filesystem to become unused. - there's no need to mount a ramfs filesystem, or a blockdev /dev/ram ext2fs-formatted filesystem for /tmp, /etc or /var/run (etc) since / is already a ramfs filesystem, thereby removing: + extra symlinks for writable files in these directories + extra mount points (with associated kernel structures) + ext2fs + rd -- Russell King (rmk@arm.linux.org.uk) The developer of ARM Linux http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/personal/aboutme.html