On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 11:26 -0400, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: > On 3/19/07, Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> wrote: > > "Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@gmail.com> writes: <snip> > > > initramfs is not an archive that gets put into a RAM disk, the ramdisk > > > is only used by initrd... the new design of initramfs replaces that > > > whole mess and takes advantage of the new tmpfs filesystem. The fact > > > that the man page has it wrong doesn't make me want to touch that in > > > any way. > > > > Actualyl I think the manpage is right. The archive gets put into the > > "ramdisk" as that is how the bootloader passes the data along. > > > > The initramfs code then checks for the achive signature in the > > "ramdisk", unpacks it to tmpfs and frees the ramdisk. > > > > That is similar to the initrd code looking at the "ramdisk", finding the > > gzip signature and uncompressing it into the actual rmadisk. > > Nope, its very wrong. You do not need ramdisk support to support > initramfs at all, we don't use ramdisk in any way. By default, meaning > its supported without regard to your .config, the cpio archive gets > packed into the kernel and later always extracted into rootfs. It's passed to the kernel at boot time just like an initrd image would be, and while tmpfs is rather different from a Linux RAM disk, it's a lot like the RAM disk provided by the AmigaOS and maybe some other operating systems. I can see that it would be more correct and perhaps less confusing for the manual page to say "tmpfs" though. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.
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