Re: Initrd and ramdisk support

[Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru>]

Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>> Unpacking initramfs...<0>Kernel panic - not syncing: bad gzip magic numbers
>> Unpacking initramfs...<0>Kernel panic - not syncing: no cpio magic
>>
>> i luckily was able to determine the malefactor. There was the initrd support 
>> built into the kernel while the ramdisk driver was just built as a module.
>>
>> Is it senseful to have the possibility to built the Initramfs/Initrd-support 
>> without having the ramdisk driver forced to be integrated also?
> 
> I hardly see a point in using initrd support without ramdisk. Where would you
> store the initrd on instead?

I build kernels without ramdisk built into, but using initramfs, for quite some
time already.  There was a patch somewhere around 2.6.15 or so, that removed
dependency of INITRD from RAMDISK, just a small Kconfig change.  Now it's in
the mainline.  For initramfs, there's no need for ramdisk - it reads the FS
image from memory (as passed to by loader), and unpacks it into ramfs - no
ramdisk is involved here.

/mjt