Re: Reducing kernel compilation time

[Cam Hutchison <camh@xdna.net>]

David Witbrodt <dawitbro@sbcglobal.net> writes:

>(My goal was to
>produce a kernel that boots without an initrd; most people will not
>share that goal.)

I would have thought that most people would share that goal, since
building an initrd is useful for only two reasons I can think of:

1) You are building a distro kernel that needs to run on many different
types of machines, since you don't know what modules would need to be
built in to find the root filesystem.

2) You have a complex method of getting the root filesystem mounted -
perhaps encrypted LVM on top of a network block device, etc, etc, etc.

Since most people who are building their own kernels probably do not
have either of these requirements, building without an initrd would
make things a lot simpler.

I looked into building an initrd with my kernel builds, but it just made
things more complicated and I could not see the point.

Is there some other reason to use an initrd when building your own
customized kernels?