Initrd and ramdisk support

Initrd and ramdisk support

[Stephan Wiebusch]

Hi!

After a very long session of searching for the reason for error messages like 

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?

King regards from Germany
Stephan Wiebusch

Re: Initrd and ramdisk support

[Jan Engelhardt]

>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?


Jan Engelhardt
-- 

Re: Initrd and ramdisk support

[Michael Tokarev]

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