Re: tar vs cpio (was: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file)

H. Peter Anvin
2001-12-23T09:53:37Z

Ryan Cumming wrote:

>
> What about recycling a big-endian version of cramfs? IIRC, the format is
> really clean, it already does compression, and is terse enough to be efficent
> for booting purposes. However, it might be too terse as it:
> 1) Doesn't support hard links
> 2) Doesn't store atime/mtime/ctime
>
> I don't know if that'd be too restrictive for an initrd replacement, but
> having only one compressed-filesystemish filesystem for the kernel would be
> nice.
>

You don't want to use the cramfs format. It does a lot of things wrong
for this application (such as block compression.)

-hpa