Re: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file

H. Peter Anvin
2001-12-18T20:37:54Z

Followup to: <59885C5E3098D511AD690002A5072D3C42D804@orsmsx111.jf.intel.com>
By author: "Grover, Andrew" <andrew.grover@intel.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> Implicit in the use of initrd is that you have to *make a ramdisk image*,
> and then tell your bootloader to load it. If you have a bootloader that can
> load multiple images (i.e. the modules themselves) you can skip the first
> step.
>

initramfs will do this just fine.

> Again, even the new scheme will still involve the creation of an initrd. I'm
> saying, as a user, it would be easier for me to not do this, and just modify
> a .conf file to have the driver loaded early-on.

See above.

> I'm not arguing that the new initrd won't be better than the old initrd
> (because obviously you are right) I'm arguing that no matter how whizzy
> initrd is, it's still an unnecessary step, and it's one that other OSs (e.g.
> FreeBSD) omit in favor of the approach I'm advocating.

Doing things in multiple steps is often appropriate.

-hpa
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